The Grief Frequency

Kealan Patrick Burke

Kindle Edition

Copyright © 2011 by Kealan Patrick Burke

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www.kealanpatrickburke.com

Other Titles by Kealan Patrick Burke

The Turtle Boy

The Hides

Vessels

Midlisters

Seldom Seen in August

Ravenous Ghosts

Underneath

Dead of Winter

Saturday Night at Eddie's

You In?

Theater Macabre

Master of the Moors

Empathy

Kin

* * *

We hit the guardrail at sixty-five miles an hour.

Fast enough to send Caitlin through the windshield.

Not fast enough for me to avoid seeing it.

Fast enough to snap the seatbelt around my father-in-law’s chest, eliciting a low but audible grunt of pain from him in the back seat as he was thrown forward, right leg colliding with the coffee holder hard enough to crush his kneecap.

Not fast enough to stop me from thinking, as the steering wheel rushed into my face like a black hole, that if we’d waited for the storm to pass, the road might have held us better.

The black hole shrank away, replaced by a supernova that spewed stars and red gas clouds into my eyes. The vehicle bounced away and Caitlin flopped on the hood as it accordioned around her.

One blazing wet blue eye found me and rolled.

My seat slammed into the back of my head just as I turned away to try and wake up from what was certainly a dream. I closed my eyes against the raging thunder of stampeding elephants; the shriek of hungry birds and almost gasped as the window shattered, splashing diamonds in the air. Dynamite charges exploded in my ears; the mirror tumbled without gravity trailing the cheap pine tree air freshener Caitlin had bought at a gas station on our trip to Maine and as it flashed toward me I saw the little boy in the back seat. The child who wasn’t there.

Just a fleeting glimpse.

Fast enough to know I’d imagined it.

Not fast enough to believe it.

* * *

We buried my wife on Sunday. It seemed the proper day to conduct such affairs. I stood motionless, staring down at the casket, wondering what was in there, for it was certainly not my wife. Only her body, a broken, stitched and made up thing, a puppet with severed strings, totally devoid of what had once made it mine.

On the opposite side of the grave stood Bill, my father-in-law, his shoulder braced to support Caitlin’s mother’s weeping face, his knuckles white around the handles of the crutches. His eyes were on me and from them radiated a cold hatred of the kind I had only just learned to apply to myself. So clear and raging were they it seemed the harsh wind blowing through the fir trees behind us swept around his glare rather than risk being scorched passing through it. I was not surprised; I was enraged. Over the grave, our hatred collided in silence:

— You killed my daughter. You took my beautiful daughter away from us you dirty sonofabitch!

She was my wife, Bill. I loved her more than life itself. She’s gone because I fucked up and I’m alone and dying inside because of it. I understand your grief, empathize with it, but don’t try and make me feel any worse you bastard, because it isn’t possible.

— You killed her.

It was an accident.

— You murdered her.

Bill, I loved her.

— Murderers don’t know how to love, Paul.

The priest, an oversized raven with a scabrous pink beak and silver crown, gestured in the air over the grave, dispelling our unspoken ire and blessing the puppet below. A shimmering eye framed by a snow-white fall of hair, peeked out from Bill’s sleeve and regarded me with a confused look that I knew would graduate to hatred once Bill told her what I was. But for now, all that look said was: I cooked you dinner, Paul. You were in my house. We cared for you. Why did you have to drive in the storm? Why, Paul? Look what you’ve made happen to our lives. You’ve put our precious little girl in the ground before us. Why? So you could make it home in time to watch the football game? I want her back, Paul. Can you bring her back? Make right what you’ve done?

The assemblage of mourners, few of whom could manage anything more than awkward smiles, shrugs and shoulder thumps, broke up, muttered words in my face I didn’t hear and went to Caitlin’s parents, perhaps seeking a more sympathetic audience for their well-rehearsed speeches.

I dug deep into the pockets of my overcoat and grabbed fistfuls of patience as I watched them queue for the opportunity to be sorry.

Then, at last, there were only the three of us.

Bill hobbled his way toward me. His wife seemed to grow smaller, the gravestones rearing up behind her, as if eager to inform her how soon she’d have one of her own.

Although I knew what was coming, I dared hope otherwise. My world had become a terribly lonely, fragile and frightening place. Caitlin’s parents were the only remaining connection to what my life had once been, anchors keeping my raft from going over the waterfall. I needed them and hated them, but the latter would inevitably fade with time, if allowed to.

Bill stopped before me, his plastered foot upraised and resting on a stone sphere marking the corner of a stranger’s gravesite.

I waited.

He stared. Then said: "If I didn’t think I’d fall, I’d break your fucking face, you bastard."

Ice water filled my belly. "Bill I—"

"I hope the game was worth it."

His cheeks were flushed, a glistening bulb of spittle nestled at the corner of his mouth, lips working desperately, trying to choke out the words that were caught in the thorns of his mind. "I hope—"

His breath caught as if I’d punched him in the stomach, and for one crazy moment, I wondered if I had, perhaps blinded to my actions by the sheer hopelessness of my situation. But then his lower lip began to tremble and tears welled in his eyes. He tried to maintain the rage but the tears washed the severity from his glare and he mentally waved me off and turned away.

"Bill I’m sorry," I said, too low for him to hear over the wind. Just as well. I wasn’t sorry. What was there to be sorry for? For the rain? For trying to drive them home before conditions got really bad? For stealing everything that was good from myself? The football game had been a joke between Caitlin and I. A long-running joke. I hated football and she knew it. Her father knew it too, but as it had been the last thing she’d said before I lost control of the car and my life, Bill had seized it. In a way I could understand. Last words are important to survivors.

"Slow down, Paul," – a sigh – "I guess the magnetic draw of Ohio V Michigan should not be underestimated." She’d smiled then and raised her eyebrow.

But of course, Bill hadn’t seen that.

Bill had seen the other car fishtailing into our lane up ahead and his cry led us inside the snow globe.

Now, I watched him leave, carefully negotiating the graves and stopping by his car with Agatha as they took one last long look back at that rectangular hole in the grass. An unkempt man with a shovel hovered around the grave, trying not to look too eager to get on with the task of filling in the hole and failing miserably. He dodged and weaved and inspected his nails, leaned on his shovel and stared at the sky. To me he looked like a kid trying to make himself small so the teacher won’t ask him a question he doesn’t know the answer to.

Then my dead wife’s parents cast another look back. I felt about as animated as the stone angels behind me.

Bill and Agatha.

Fire and Ice.

And then they were gone, leaving me to listen to the wind hissing through the pines and the first few schnicks of the caretaker’s shovel.

* * *

In the days afterward, grief stayed with me like a nagging aunt, probing my wounds at the slightest sign I’d forgotten them, whispering can’t forget, never forget in my ear whenever I tried to distract myself.

I haunted the house, drifting from room to room, trying to avoid the image of Caitlin. But she was there, sitting on the sofa, legs crossed, foot bouncing as she clicked through the channels on the television, muttering her disdain for infomercials and sighing at the compelling insanity of talk shows. She was in the kitchen, playing with her hair, brooding over a woman’s magazine or rolling her eyes

(One blazing wet blue eye found me and rolled)

at my culinary ineptitude. She was in the shower, pulling back the curtain and smiling coyly, moving to cover up her nakedness despite seven years of marriage and when I kissed her, her lips were soft and warm and wet. In the bedroom mirror, she stood in her business suit, preparing for another joyless day in real estate, the cute curl on her forehead reversed as I watched her reflection smile back at me in response to the same question I asked every morning:

"Can’t you come back to bed for another ten minutes?"

"You know I can’t. Besides, I’m dressed now."

"So stay dressed. Just lose the panties."

Smile. "Ten minutes? Isn’t that a little ambitious?"

"Ingrate."

I saw her in bed then, sleeping on her side, her hair obscuring her face; hand laying flat on the pillow beside her, other hand resting on her hip, her breathing like the ebb and flow of a gentle tide. She was in the bedroom and that’s where I found her again.

At first I thought I was dreaming it.

But she was there. Real. I mentally pinched myself, chastised the scowling aunt for being so callous, and closed my eyes for as long as I could bear it, until the blindness inspired panic. And when I looked again, she was still there. If not her, another woman, remarkably similar in size, shape, sound, but of course I knew no other women remotely like her. And no other woman knew me well enough to dare sleep in my wife’s memory. I stood in the bedroom doorway, sagged against the frame and wept. Madness. There could be no alternative solution. I was seeing her. She was there and my conviction was so great it could only mean I’d lost my mind for I do not nor have I ever believed in miracles.

I wanted her back, yes. I wanted to wake up and find this was all just an awful, awful dream, a Dickensian view of what might have been. But I did not want the shady promises illusion wrought. No, not that. The inevitable comedown would obliterate whatever light was left.

And so I left her there, took cautious steps backward, hurrying only when she stirred. If she got up, if she shrugged off the binds of imagination and approached, smiled, spoke or touched me, I might die where I stood.

I gently closed the door and made my way, head in hands, into the living room where my sole comfort awaited me in a bottle with a turkey on the front.

I never made it to the bottle.

I made it to the sofa and stopped when I saw someone was already sitting there.

Small. Blonde hair. Legs kicking in child-like delight.

Giggling.

I ran from the house.

* * *

I found a bar a short walk from the house. I didn’t want to be there but I wanted less to be home with the ghosts or the canvas for my madness. So I settled for the spirits and somehow managed to tune out the raucous noise from the crowd of revelers at my back. An occasional slam of a jaunty fist against a table tugged me from myself but it was quickly dismissed, as was the barmaid, a girl who had the shape and face of a teenager but the eyes of someone older. Once or twice she attempted to penetrate my veil of misery but my responses were curt and soon she gave up.

I stared down at my glass, at my left eye swimming in the amber depths and told myself I was going to be all right sooner or later. But I didn’t believe it.

I come from a hard family, hard meaning we hit you only because we love you and as a result I have a short temper and a high physical and mental pain threshold. Between Caitlin and I, I was the strong one, always ready with the innumerable solutions to quandaries she considered hopeless. I rolled with the punches, she curled up in a ball and waited for me to make it better. But now all my strength had left me. I felt like a man who’d missed the last train home and was stranded on the platform watching it dwindle in the distance. Every flame I tended was quickly smothered by the dark, every smile splintered by Auntie Grief, who, appalled that I would dare attempt such a gesture of contentment, doubled the dosage of debilitating sorrow in my head.

Hope was gone.

And I was sure at that moment – a dim revelation that made me feel neither better nor worse – that what I had seen at my house today was not my wife come to tell me she had gone on to a better place or that I should live on and not worry, but rather my memory projecting reminders purely to torture me. Self-torture, in other words and the surest path to total, unbridled, dance-naked-on-the rooftops insanity.

And I was too weak to resist it.

Besides, who knew that insanity wasn’t the answer to everything? Perhaps then I could accept those projections without fearing what they implied about my condition, sleep once more with my wife, hold her, kiss her, smell her, have her.

Perhaps, but I was not ready to take that step yet, if indeed it was within my power to take it at all.

* * *

I drank too much and by the time I left the bar Auntie Grief was screaming and jamming her nails into my temples. I squinted at curious passers-by who regarded me with ill-concealed suspicion and sometimes amusement, and tried not to weep. And yet she screamed and screamed at me until I couldn’t help but scream right back.

Finally she did stop, though the throbbing she’d inspired in my brain continued. I was standing at my front door, nose pressed to the oak, staring at the cracks and stabbing the wood with my key, hoping I could torture it into revealing the lock. And now, ironically, I yearned for her to scream again. For though it was quiet, I was now gripped by the paranoid certainty that it was silent not because the house was empty but because whoever was inside had stopped talking, stopped breathing at the sound of my approach.

Inside was as I’d left it, hollow and draped in blue-black shadows like oil paintings of bruises. With more courage than I could claim in daylight or sobriety, I peeked over the back of the sofa and found no one there. Just the cushions and the small black Sanyo remote control, which was comforting — though I was not at all sure I had left it in exactly that position.

I sat down on the sofa and felt the energy drain from me, switched on the television with no intention of watching it. Just for company. Ambience. To dissuade whatever nightmares might be crouching behind my eyes waiting for lights-out.

I dozed fitfully, waking only occasionally to probe the extent of my burgeoning hangover, to straighten my crooked neck, or to check that yes, life was still a horror show.

My mouth was dry, tongue lying like a baked worm behind my teeth; every swallow made a clicking sound. I groaned.

Darkness danced a merry dance as I drifted away on a stormy sea of slumber.

And when a child’s cool hand slipped into mine, I did not pull away. Nor did I scream.

But the child did.

* * *

The next morning I awoke slowly, in no hurry to leave the blissful ignorance of sleep, the task made all that more difficult by the golden fire of the sun streaming in on top of me. As I opened my eyes and blinked away the grains of muddy sleep, I waited for the pain to hit me. It did not disappoint.

Like codependents, the sorrow and the hangover came hand in hand, sprinkling ground glass into my eyes and kicking at the walls of my skull with no apology. Rising only incited violence, my insides revolting at the mere idea of standing, and so I sat, leaned forward and cradled my head in my hands. A thin membrane of old cigarette smoke clung to the inside of my mouth. My clothes felt like too-tight bandages, constricting my breathing and trapping night sweat beneath.

The shrill sound of the phone ringing was akin to someone on the other side of the room screeching and throwing javelins at my temple. In response, the twins Sorrow and Hangover launched a melee attack, intensifying their efforts as I got to my feet. The good aunt’s nefarious whispers wound round my brain once more: all your fault, all your fault. Suffer now, as you should.

I saw stars and white sparks, fireworks in my vision as I made my way with painstaking slowness to the phone. I didn’t care who was calling. I needed to pick the damn thing up. To silence it.

"Hello?" I breathed into the mouthpiece, the word feeling foul and cumbersome as it slid out of my mouth. Never drinking again.

There was no reply but I could tell someone was on the line. Traffic roared by in the background, footsteps clacked and receded. I concluded that whoever the caller was, they were calling from a payphone.

"Hello?" I closed my eyes, ran a hand over my face and heard the rasp of stubble. When had I shaved last? More than a few days. The morning of Caitlin’s funeral, maybe. I couldn’t remember.

"Paul." The word was spoken flat, a statement not an inquiry, and totally devoid of any emotion.

"Bill?" I felt the acidic mass in my stomach do a full cycle. Great, I thought. Not only had I awakened to an assault by Sorrow and Hangover, now Rage was on the line. I was seriously considering throwing up.

"We need to talk," said Bill, his breath sounding like a herd of rhino rumbling over the Serengeti. "I’ll be at Hoffman’s Café in about an hour. Meet me there."

A demand, not a request, which left only one response.

"All right. I’ll be there."

"Good." He hung up.

Confused, I glanced at my watch. Almost noon. I stood for a moment looking at the sharp edges of this new reality that had grown to loathe me, then took two Excedrin and trudged toward the shower. I wondered why Bill wanted to meet me. I hoped it was to make peace. After all, we had once been good friends. But I didn’t think that was it. His voice had not sounded apologetic, or even remotely forgiving, which led me to believe another unpleasant confrontation was on the cards, and that I could most certainly do without.

The shower sluiced some of the drunken caul away, but not enough. I dressed as respectably as I could muster without being sick at the effort it required and downed two cups of scalding hot coffee before I headed out the door.

* * *

The aroma of honey and coffee grounds filled the air inside the café and as it was still lunchtime, the place was packed. I spotted Bill sitting at a table with his back to the wall in the no smoking area, his crutches leaning in the corner. He looked ancient, back hunched, eyes little more than dark screw holes in a chalk wall. I had seen road maps with less lines and wrinkles.

As I approached, he looked in my direction, then slowly down at his fingers. The message was clear. He didn’t want to be here any more than I did. Which got the hornets buzzing again.

I was intercepted on my way to the table by a painfully thin girl who informed me of the specials like a drug dealer desperate to get rid of her last dime bag. I wondered if they had her working on commission. I ordered a coffee ("sadistically strong with nothing but coffee in it, okay?") and tried not to take her disappointment too personally.

Bill was making the world’s tiniest paper airplane out of an empty sugar packet when I finally reached the table. A small scattering of white grains surrounded his elbows. He did not look at me as I took my seat.

"Hi," I said at last.

"Wasn’t sure you’d come," he replied, biting his lower lip as he struggled to fold back the final wing on the origami stealth fighter.

"You didn’t give me much time to argue. Besides, why wouldn’t I come?"

He shrugged. "Any number of reasons."

"I figured it was important."

"You smell like liquor."

I reddened at that, a warm cocktail of shame and irritation. "Do I."

"Yeah. Been hitting it mighty hard I imagine."

Here we go. "Yeah well, it helps."

"How?"

"Is that what you wanted to talk about? My drinking?"

"No. It isn’t."

"Then why am I here?"

Bill set the plane down on the table between us and watched it unfolding itself. He sighed and finally those dark eyes met mine.

"I want you to know something," he said, lacing his fingers together. "I want you to know that I won’t ever forgive you for what happened. In some, probably more rational part of me, I know it was an accident and I know you’re hurting too and that you’d never have intentionally harmed her. But that’s just a little whisper and it won’t ever be loud enough for me to fully accept it. You were driving. Caitlin died. That’s fact."

I wanted to argue then, but stopped myself. There was something in Bill’s face, something written in the new lines there that kept me quiet.

He continued. "I wish it could be different, but…" The last person to say those words to me had been my old boss at Kelvin’s Auto Body and Repair. He’d used them after announcing things were going badly and that I had to be let go. Bill was not only using the same words now, but the same insincere tone too.

"So do I," I told him and sat back as the reed-thin waitress deposited my unimaginative cup of coffee before me. I thanked her, watched her pretend she hadn’t heard, then sipped the oily brew. It was only a shade better than I remembered it. I grabbed the sugar.

"There’s something else," Bill said and now he looked decidedly uncomfortable. I paused, spoon mired in the coffee, sugar unstirred. "The reason I asked you to meet me here."

"Bill—"

"No. Let me say this. Don’t interrupt me, this is hard enough."

That made my heartbeat slow to a crawl.

He sighed and it seemed most of the strength of his bones emerged on dusty clouds. "There’s something about the accident you don’t know."

The hair prickled on my neck. Hornets buzzed.

"The doctor told me while you were getting your nose set. He wanted to tell you too but I told him not to. Threatened him not to actually, because he said it was your right. I told him it would destroy you. Like it destroyed me. Like it would destroy Caitlin’s mother if she knew."

"Bill." I swallowed dryly, my hand creeping across the table to latch onto his arm. My skin was cold though sweat ran freely from my pores. I could smell the liquor now too.

"She was pregnant Paul."

"You’re lying."

I knew he wasn’t.

"You’re a fucking liar, Bill."

I knew it all along, deep down inside where the sun don’t shine, my mind cried, but my mouth said: "Why are you doing this to me?"

Bill closed his eyes and shook his head. "I wasn’t going to tell you at all. But I realized it’s something that shouldn’t be kept from you. Not — " He examined his fingernails. " — knowing how much you loved her."

"No."

"You’re mourning her right now. No matter how much I might detest the sight of you, it’s only right that you should mourn your child too."

Hot breath filled my throat. My fists clenched involuntarily, reacting to my overwhelming need to hit him, to knock that impassive expression right out through the back of his lying hating skull.

But I didn’t. I simply sat, stunned, and tried to keep the tears from coming. My head felt stuffed with cotton. I covered my face with my hands, embarrassed and when I looked up, the seat across from me was empty and an old man was hobbling his way to the door.

I picked up my cup, stared at it for a moment, then flung it at the space where just a few seconds before, my dead wife’s father had told me a truth I could have died never knowing.

The cup smashed against the wall, but it was not enough. I rose, catching my thighs on the underside of the table. Like a maddened animal, I pushed away and kicked at the flimsy pine until it tumbled and landed on its side, condiments and imitation porcelain bowls skidding and clinking across the tile floor.

Breathing heavily, I turned, teeth clenched. All faces were on the lunatic in the corner. Behind the counter, the thin waitress stood with a phone to her ear.

I murmured a quiet, useless apology and hurried to the door unchallenged.

The unscheduled entertainment was over.

* * *

The last time she’d mentioned it was the night of our three-year anniversary.

We were lying in bed after making love, our bodies cooling in the breeze from the open window. Her arm was thrust across my chest, fingers playing with the hair there, her chin against my shoulder, her breath tickling my ear as I drifted in and out of pleasurable dozing.

"Is now a good time?" she said softly and I opened my eyes.

"Mmm?"

"Remember the last time I wanted to talk about having kids? It wasn’t a good time for you."

And I was awake. It was a subject that sent currents of unease through me every time I thought about it. Hearing her bringing it up now increased the voltage.

"Yeah."

"You said you wanted to wait until we got settled. Until you were sure your boss wasn’t just dicking you around. Remember?"

"Yes I do." I stared at the ceiling, imagining tactful prompts written there.

"Well?"

"Well what?"

She raised her head and threaded her fingers through her hair, dark face searching mine. "Well…I think we’re pretty settled now, don’t you?"

"I guess."

"I mean, we have the house, the car, we’re in pretty good shape financially. Work is good for both of us…so why not try for one now."

"One what?" I said and she nudged me. Hard.

"Don’t act like an idiot." She sighed and when she spoke, I could hear the smile. "I think we’re ready."

I said nothing. Had nothing to say. I didn’t want a child and although I had promised her before and after we were married that we’d have lots of kids, I dreaded the idea of it. Until now, I had successfully warded off conversations like this, but there was no escaping it now and that meant one of us would be going to sleep unsatisfied.

"I don’t think I’m ready yet," I said and braced myself.

"Why not?"

"I just…I just don’t." Truth was, I didn’t have an excuse other than fear and I knew that wouldn’t cut it at all. I never had anything against kids. I just didn’t want one. Maybe a psychiatrist could have unearthed some complicated reason for that, traced the fear back to my own childhood and put a check mark in the appropriate box on his Freudian chart, I didn’t know. I was afraid, more afraid than I’d ever been in my life.

"I’m thirty-four years old, Paul. How much longer are you going to make me wait? Until it’s too late?"

If honesty had had a mouth of its own at that moment it would have told her yes, that’s exactly what Paulie here wants.

But in the absence of that second mouth, the first stayed shut.

"Paul?" She shoved me, harder than was necessary. "Answer me."

"I don’t want children, Caitlin, and I’m sorry I ever led you to believe otherwise." There, it was out but as I lay there almost hearing it register in her mind, I had the unsettling impression that the light in the room was fading, that the shadows were crawling down the walls. Coming for me. Coming to make me pay for stealing her hope.

"Why?" she whispered then. "Why didn’t you tell me?"

"Because I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. And…I didn’t want to hurt you like this."

She lay back down then and turned away from me. "Nice job, you bastard."

The shadows continued leaking from the corners of the ceiling, running like tar down the walls. It was exhaustion, I knew, but I couldn’t bear to watch them stalking me. Couldn’t bear to share the bed with a woman I knew hated me at that moment.

I got up and went into the living room, where I watched Abbot & Costello hamming it up on television, and tried to pretend the sound of crying was only in my head.

* * *

I half-expected to see the police at the door when I got home, perhaps accompanied by an outraged coffee shop owner. But the street was deserted.

The early afternoon sunshine had been lost in a veil of gray and apart from the distant drone of an airplane navigating the clouds overhead there was silence.

I let myself into a house that reeked of alcohol and quickly undressed, taking great care not to look at the sofa or in any of the dark corners.

After my second shower of the day, I crawled naked into bed and slept.

I did not dream but sometime in the night, I heard the phone ring and someone called my name from the answering machine.

Sometime in the night, I heard a woman crying.

Sometime in the night, I was not alone.

And at dawn when I awoke, there was a child in my arms.

He was facing away from me, unmoving, his thinly haired head moving only to accommodate his gentle breathing. I smiled, and hugged him to my chest and was rewarded with the smell of talcum powder and freshly bathed skin.

"Why did I ever fear you?" I whispered to the child and kissed the top of his head. He stirred and my mouth filled with dust.

It was coming back. All of it. Even the things that had never happened.

I turned my head as much as I could without waking the child and saw Caitlin in the mirror. She was fixing the collar of her business suit, her face scrunched up in concentration.

My beautiful wife.

I cleared my throat softly and said: "Can’t you come back to bed for another ten minutes?"

She looked at me, smiled. "You know I can’t. Besides, I’m dressed now."

I felt the sorrow thicken in my chest. "So stay dressed. Stay. Just lose…just lose the panties."

"Ten minutes? Isn’t that a little ambitious?"

"Ingrate."

I looked down and saw that I was cradling a drifting sea of dust motes lit by a spray of fire from the morning sun, though for a moment, the weight and warmth of the child remained. I kept my hands in place for fear the sensation would dissipate and mourned it when it did. Caitlin was gone too. The air had changed and the shadows were shrinking.

I was alone as before. With one difference.

Now I knew what to do.

* * *

I waited for the rain and it came on Tuesday. Four days after waking to find the child in my arms (a boy, I knew, from what I’d seen, though even the doctors wouldn’t have been able to tell.)

A fine rain, less severe than the one that had guided my car into the guardrail, but it would do.

After making sure the house was clean and smelling of something other than sweat, fear and alcohol, I showered, shaved and dressed in the suit I’d worn on my first date with Caitlin. Back then, it had been stylish, worn to win the approval of a woman I feared losing even before I had her. Now it was too short at the sleeves, tight across the shoulders and had a button dangling from the cuff. None of which mattered. I complimented the dark suit with a crimson tie, splashed on some cologne (Hugo Boss—Caitlin’s favorite) and combed my hair.

Before I left, I called Bill.

"I wanted to thank you," I told him.

"For what?"

"For telling me about the baby."

"It wouldn’t have been right not to."

"Well thank you, and for what it’s worth, you and Agatha were always good to me. I want you to know that I loved your daughter with all that was in me, and I love her still."

There was nothing but the sound of his ragged breathing for a moment.

Then: "Paul?"

"Yes?"

"What’s going on?"

"Nothing."

"What are you going to do?"

I had to smile. Before she introduced me to her father for the very first time, Caitlin had imparted a caveat: Don’t try and pull the wool over his eyes, Paul. He can see through a lie at twenty paces.

"Goodbye Bill," I said, the sound of his worried voice trailing from the phone until it met the cradle.

Next I took a cab to the Avis outlet in Delaware and spent a ridiculous amount of time filling out forms and answering questions, some of which had little or nothing to do with car rental. But I kept my patience, even smiling at the clerk who had no idea as he handed over the keys that he would never see the car or me again.

* * *

I stopped at the Kwik 'n' Go, a small grocery store-cum-gas station on the outskirts of Delaware, then took Old State Road 21 to the highway. In the opposite direction, the traffic formed an endless unmoving parade with lights like glaring eyes as workers returned home from their jobs in Columbus. The rain fell like molten silver, my wipers squeak-thumping to keep the windshield of my rented Toyota clear.

The car smelled like disinfectant, reminding me of the item I’d picked up at the store and smiling faintly, I removed the pine tree freshener from its plastic wrapper and with one hand on the wheel, looped it around the neck of the rearview mirror. There was no immediate scent from the freshener so I flicked a nail against it to set it swinging and relaxed back into my seat, slowing for the red light at the intersection.

We’d been coming back from the doctor’s office that day. Bill’s back had been at him again and he’d been in too much pain to drive himself. Agatha couldn’t drive or she would have obliged. Got in an accident once and never drove again, she proudly proclaimed. Sometimes you don’t want to play chicken with the reaper.

Knowing my fear of hospitals (I’d watched my aunt die a horrible, spluttering death in one as a kid), Caitlin had told me to wait in the small cafeteria while she took care of her father. Which I did. Gladly. They weren’t gone long, but when they returned, Caitlin was a deathly white. Concerned, I’d gone to her but she waved me away, claiming the smell of the place had just made her queasy. She hadn’t eaten all day, she said, which didn’t help. Her father followed, looking stoical and much straighter than before. "Good as new," he announced and herded us back out to the car.

He knew. Bill had faked the pain in his back (though he did have a history of them – just not this time) so he could be with Caitlin when she learned if she was pregnant or not. I still didn’t understand why she didn’t just go alone or why she confided in him before me? Granted, she knew I wouldn’t be thrilled by the news, but Jesus…

Caitlin and my child were dead. But they had come back to me somehow, detached themselves from the fabric of the rational world to force me into thinking outside my own self-imposed limitations. Our world is fluid; I know that now. Nothing solid is really solid at all. Everything has levels. Bill, Agatha, even the Avis kid and the gravedigger exist on one, the dead on another and sometimes grief can shake the core of those levels and send the habitants of one tumbling into the next. The dead can be among the living; the living, among the dead. Normal rules no longer apply. But not everyone is tuned to the required frequency, the one I had come to know as the Grief Frequency — that special line of communication that exists so the lost can be found, as I had been found.

"Makes you long for the summer again, doesn’t it?" Caitlin said then, startling me and I jerked on the wheel, almost ending it there and then. As it was, I had to struggle to get the car back in lane, my heart thudding furiously, awash in the sudden flow of adrenaline. And fear. Which worried me. In that few seconds, a thought had spiked its way to the forefront of my brain: I don’t want to die. Would it come again when I reached that dented guardrail, preventing me from doing what I knew deep down had to be done? No, it couldn’t. I wouldn’t let it.

With a shaky sigh, I turned to look at Caitlin. She was sitting in the passenger seat, chewing on a strand of her hair and peering intently out at the road ahead. She was dressed in one of my denim shirts and navy sweatpants. The clothes she’d worn the day she died.

Somewhere behind me, a car horn pierced the air.

"Even with all the blasted mosquitoes," she continued.

And then I knew what I was doing was right. These were Caitlin’s words from before the accident and though I couldn’t remember, I would have bet anything that our car was in the same place on the road now as it had been when she’d first said them. That’s why she was here, to lull me into the memory, to show me I was on the right track. To guide me there.

I looked in the rearview mirror, expecting to see Bill grinning back at me, but there was no one there, just beads of rain racing each other across the back window.

"I love you Caitlin," I told her, aching to touch her but afraid of what might happen if I tried. No. It was best to not interfere. I leaned on the accelerator and the engine whirred. The road was clear ahead, the rain steadily drumming against the hood and splattering against the windshield.

Closer.

A car honked in the left lane. I ignored it. I was in my lane and if the bastard was trying to pass me, he’d have to drive a little faster.

On impulse, I checked the mirror again to see if Bill had appeared to play his role. He hadn’t.

The car honked again and I squinted through the rain-smeared glass as the offending vehicle drew level with mine, matching my speed. I saw the pale blur of a face, too clear for it to be behind its own window.

I put more weight on the accelerator. Swallowed.

The pine freshener filled the car with its sickly sweet scent.

No turning back now.

I saw Caitlin brace herself, felt the rigidity infecting her body.

The driver in the next lane drew level again, beating a staccato rhythm on the horn. Trying to get my attention.

"Slow down, Paul," Caitlin said, with a sigh. "I guess the magnetic draw of Ohio V Michigan should not be underestimated."

I rolled down the window, allowing the rain to spit in my face.

Allowing me to see the pale face screaming at me from the other car.

Bill, in the passenger seat, window down, hands gripping the door. Agatha driving. The beginnings of a smile creased my lips. The old woman was hunched over the wheel, face stark white, eyes wide and fixed on the road. Sometimes you don’t want to play chicken with the reaper.

And then Caitlin screamed. I looked from her to the black oblong looming in the windshield. A semi, stopped at the lights. I wrenched the wheel to the right, the muscles in my arms protesting with fiery bursts of pain but it was much too late for such concerns.

I stomped on the brakes. I don’t want to die.

But it was much too late for that too.

We missed the semi by inches.

We hit the guardrail at sixty-five miles an hour.

* * *

They came to see me this morning, Bill and Agatha, dressed up to the nines and smiling genuine smiles, something I will never tire of seeing. I guess tragedy and loss are recyclable after all.

Agatha sat with me for a while and we reminisced about Caitlin, gone a year ago today. We laughed, we cried and we sat in silence when no words were needed.

"When you get out," she told me as she prepared to let Bill have his turn, "you have to promise you’ll come see us. I might even take you for a ride." She winked and turned away before the tears came. I’m still amazed she drove that day, and so damn fast, after all her proclamations to the contrary.

I watched her shuffle down the long white hall toward the restrooms, then looked up at Bill, who removed his hat and hunkered down next to my chair. His face was close enough that I could smell the cologne he’d dappled on that morning. It was not an unpleasant smell. The lines seemed to have faded too. Time is treating him well.

"How are you son?" he asked, a hand on my arm.

I would have shrugged, but had I managed such a thing, the nurses would have proclaimed me a miracle case.

"Better," I said, though we both knew different.

"That’s good," Bill said, his smile dropping a notch. He looked down at the floor then up at the wall as if searching for notes to draw from. "They tell you yet when you might be ready to get — "

"Not yet," I interrupted. "Soon though."

Another lie. The second accident left me with a severed spinal cord and a gunny sack for a body. The surgery does little but add years and more gray hairs, and the therapy for my ‘ongoing delusions’ only threatens to drive me back inside myself where the hours of questions and condescending smiles cannot reach. I exist in a twilit place, never fully awake, never fully asleep, and that suits me fine, because that’s where I see them the most.

"Have you made many friends here, Paul?"

"Some."

My only real friend here is Nurse Limner. She doesn’t talk much, but she can write fast and if you’re reading this right now, you have her to thank. Nurse Patricia Limner, who sits with me for hours and transcribes my thoughts and never judges me by them. You should know she’s smiling now.

"We think about you a lot," Bill said. "About what happened and why. I can’t help but feel responsible…I mean…the grief I gave you when…when…"

"Bill."

He looked up, eyes watery. "What?"

"If you cry I’ll kick your ass."

He laughed then, a clumsy snort that produced a bubble of snot from one nostril. He quickly sniffed it back in, embarrassed, which in turn made me laugh in my hideous grinding way.

"I’m sorry," he said. "I guess that’s what I wanted to say."

"You have nothing to be sorry for. We lost a lot. Both of us. That much hurt can change people, bring out sides to them they never knew they had. I think I’m living proof of that."

He looked away. "Do you…still see them?"

I waited for his eyes to find me again before answering. "Only in dreams."

He nodded, squeezed my hand, then looked at it and rose, knees popping.

As if they’d prearranged it, the restroom door squeaked and Agatha appeared, a mangled tissue poking out of her fist. She gave me a coy wave and Bill nodded to her. "I better go," he said with an awkward smile. "We’re holding a mass for Caitlin and Paul tonight."

They told me a few months ago they’d decided to name the child though were hesitant at first because the sex of the child had never been determined. I told them it was a boy and they were kind enough not to ask how I knew. The boy needed a name. Everyone does. At the end when the lights go out, it may be all you have left in the world. And survivors need to label their memories somehow.

He clamped a hand on my shoulder. "We love you Paul. You’ll never be alone as long as we’re around."

I thanked him with as much sincerity as I could muster, then watched them leave with more than a pang of sadness in my chest. They are good people, always will be.

But they just don’t get it.

They’re not tuned into things the way I am.

I don’t blame them for that. Not everyone is so lucky.

My nights are spent lying in a bed with various machines singing an incessant chorus in my ear. I want to move, to walk, to run but can’t and chances are I never will. But I’m learning to deal with that too. In fact, I’m starting to need it.

Because they never visit me when someone’s here. They wait until the door is shut and the curtains are drawn and the only sounds are the machines and my breathing. Then they come, stepping from the walls and smiling, sitting by my side and stroking my hair. They stay until dawn.

Things will get better. I really do believe that. I have to believe it.

Because there are things I must see, things of which every proud father wants to be a part.

Like last night, in the dark, when Paul took his first step.

###

About the Author

Kealan Patrick Burke is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Turtle Boy, The Hides, Vessels, Kin, Midlisters, Master of the Moors, Ravenous Ghosts, The Number 121 to Pennsylvania & Others, Currency of Souls, Seldom Seen in August, and Jack & Jill.

Visit him on the web at: http://www.kealanpatrickburke.com or facebook.com/kealan.burke

Other books by Kealan Patrick Burke:

Praise for KIN

"If you're a fan of Jack Ketchum, Richard Laymon, or movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Deliverance, don't miss Kin. Burke's novel not only re-imagines the classic slasher tropes, but it invents new ones. Kin is sure to garner Burke a wider readership, awards, and to inspire a slew of new slasher novels and films. This is a modern classic, and I cannot recommend it highly enough." - FEARNET

"It's odd that an Irish transplant to the Northern US has written one of the best Southern Gothic novels in recent memory. I'll look forward to Burke's next work just as much as I hated to see this one end. I would highly recommend Kin to lovers of old fashioned horror fiction with a twist." DARK DISCOVERIES

"...with this novel, Burke has fully arrived as a novelist…his talent running full throttle... Kin ends a long period of silence from Burke, and has me quite excited to see what's coming next. It gets my highest possible recommendation." OCTOBER COUNTRY

"THIS is serious horror fiction that has set a high standard for future stories in this subgenre. Don't miss it." THE CROW'S CAW

"The blurb will tell you that this is in the vein of the ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre' and ‘Deliverance' and, while I can see what they mean, it doesn't do the book justice. This is not a ‘slasher' book or a book that reads like a movie. This is far more. This is a novel that begins where the other stories ended and explores the impact such horror has on the survivors, their family and, though we may not like them, the perpetrators of the horror." THE BIG THRILL

"Kin is not only the best novel I’ve read all year, it is one of the most horrifying ones I’ve ever read." – HORROR WORLD

"If you took the moral quandaries about revenge, justice and violence against evil from Dennis Lehane’s Patrick Kenzie novels, spread it over the sprawling cast of a Stephen King thriller, and mixed it with the Southern Gothic grotesques of Eudora Welty, you might end up with something like Kealan Patrick Burke’s new novel, Kin." LITSTACK

VISIT THE AMAZON.COM PAGE to read an exclusive excerpt and to learn more about Kealan Patrick Burke's new novel KIN.