Denis Ever After, Page 2

  “Denis! Denis! Denisssss!”

  I have to respond.

  If I want to stay sane.

  Which I kind of do.

  5

  Home Fires

  That night the beach in Port Haven is calm.

  I’m not.

  Matt’s gotten noisier by the minute. I’m still terrified of the razor, so even though my brain pounds inside my skull, like it’s trying to get out, I have another go at the grotto to see if I can discover what my brother’s suddenly so cranky about.

  I find Matt with Mom and Dad in our living room in Buckwood, which is in Pennsylvania. The TV is off. The three of them are staring zombielike at the blank screen. I don’t know how long they’ve been doing this, but if the classroom was tense, this is a war zone. In the silence I scan the room. No photographs of family, as you might see in other homes, and I remember it was always that way. This explains something, but I’m not sure what.

  All at once Mom bolts to her feet, like a corpse bursting from her grave, but then slumps back to the couch like a dropped sandbag. Her body is shooting black sparks in every direction. It bites me somewhere deep in the chest to see her like this, and I understand why we’re not encouraged to visit.

  Mom has gotten far older than five years should have made her. The smile she used to give me and Matt is stone gone. It’s not in her face anymore. She’s thin—as if she eats only enough to keep her moving. Her cheeks have caved in; her hair is streaked with gray. She’s what, forty, forty-one? I try to imagine her arms around me now, and there isn’t any warmth there. There is only grief. Her eyes are dead when she turns them to Dad.

  He presses his fingers against his temples and flicks a look at Matt, who is buried in a soft chair. Dad is a broad-shouldered man who works outside, real physical, but the afternoon joker I remember is as gone as Mom’s smile. If Dad is grieving, it’s a different kind than hers. He is smoldering inside, quivering. His sparks are angry and hot, darts of dark light firing off him like sniper bullets. He carries a heavy weight on his shoulders, which I have to think is me.

  Seeing them like this, in my old home, I’m slapped in the face to remember how our family—Matt, me, my mom, and my dad—were in line to be really happy.

  It wasn’t like one twin got all the smarts or looks. We both got plenty. Matt was musical. I ran fast. Matt was the better reader and test taker. I was way funnier and inventive and had clever ideas. I gather Dad wasn’t superhappy when he was young, though I never knew why, but his job as manager of a landscaping company was solid, and he liked being outside in the weather. He was good at it, too. Mom worked part-time in our school library, did story times and read-alouds with the younger kids. She could be anything, really, but she wanted to be near us. We ate together every night. We took vacations. We had fun.

  It was a small life, I guess, but it was sweet and moving forward, until the day I got sick or had an accident or drowned or whatever I did, and all the good stuff was kicked off the edge of a cliff.

  As I hover over the scene now, I notice what I didn’t in class—Matt’s hair is not only long, it’s greasy, like he rubs grease in it. Clusters of pimples dot his cheeks, and his fingernails are bitten down to the quick. I honestly can’t figure why Trey hangs out with him.

  “Matt, explain it to me again?” Mom says, breaking the silence. “When your teacher called, he was really sympathetic, but I didn’t understand what he was saying you did? I know he could have sent you to the office, but he didn’t. What exactly did you do?”

  Matt turns to Dad, who might understand but just sits there staring at the floor. Matt doesn’t answer.

  “Why did you go into the teachers’ lounge, of all places?” Mom goes on. “You can’t . . . What’s happened with you over the last couple of weeks, Matt? Your schoolwork is suffering. . . .”

  In his mind Matt is reading the papers he made copies of in the lounge, the papers he shook at his teacher and that are now hidden in a box under his bed. They seem official and have marks stamped on them and seals—like school forms or doctor reports.

  “I was . . . upset,” Matt says weakly.

  “Obviously,” Mom snaps. “Mr. Brown said you were shaking. Are you coming down with something?” She leans forward, wanting to reach out and touch his forehead like GeeGee touches mine, but not doing it. “Maybe you picked up something at St. Francis last week.”

  I sense from Matt’s sudden thoughts about a trumpet that St. Francis is a hospice in Buckwood and that the school band gave a performance there.

  Dad lifts his head. “It isn’t that, Bonnie. He’s . . . Matt, you’ve been looking at maps, haven’t you?”

  Mom falls back into the couch, as if out of breath. “Maps? Of what? Oh. No, Matt. You can just forget anything to do with that. Maps!”

  She purses her lips tightly, suddenly goes cold, like a switch has just been flipped. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t get another detention. That’s all I have to say. You can go to your room now, Matt. Bed. No phone.” She nods toward the stairs and folds her arms over her chest with a quiver. Matt excuses himself, walks upstairs to his room.

  Maps? Really? I thought maps were a good thing. They tell you where things are and stuff.

  I search my parents, from one to the other. It’s hard to look them in the face. My dad is barely recognizable. I don’t know if he’s lifted his head once since I got here. And Mom. She’s a block of ice. Angry ice, if ice can be angry, and so cold inside.

  Without a word, she flicks off the lamp nearest her, sits for a moment, waiting for something from my dad that doesn’t come, then leaves the room and drags herself up the stairs step by step, like she’s carrying a body and can’t put it down.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I whisper as she passes. “I love you.”

  Of course she doesn’t hear me.

  Lights go off, one then another, around the house.

  After sitting silently for a half hour, fingering the television remote but not using it, Dad trudges up the steps. Strange how going upstairs at the end of the day is so hard for them.

  He changes out of his clothes and lies down in bed next to my mom, careful not to disturb her, though she’s not sleeping and probably can’t, because her mind is a swirl of dark, churning water.

  6

  The Unfinished Work

  I shift my gaze to Matt’s room. So easy to do. He lies awake, listening to the dying sounds of the house. The creak of floorboards, the hum of the hot water pipes. It’s dark in his room except for a mini flashlight lying in the folds of his blanket. Hearing nothing but the settling house, he quietly slides a flat box out from under his bed.

  It’s then that I see my bed, the bed I slept in until I died. It’s still pushed against the inside wall, made neatly and unslept in. It’s been empty for five years, but it’s still there.

  Matt doesn’t give it a glance as he mouths the flashlight and burrows out of the box several folded maps, a couple of old books, and the papers from school today.

  Unfolding a map, he studies it under the light. He can’t see me, of course. I’m still watching from the misty grotto. Matt won’t see me unless I haunt him for real, which I don’t know I’ll try, despite what GeeGee says. I’m only observing him trace his fingers across a map covered in lines and curved arrows. It’s a Civil War battlefield. Pennsylvania has a couple. This is Gettysburg, the most famous. I’ve never gone there, though he might have, since.

  So what’s the deal? Is he studying for a history test in the dark? Why is this a secret? Mom freaked out when Dad said he was looking at maps. What’s wrong with maps?

  Then he flips open a book to a photograph of one of the monuments on the battlefield, a big block of dark stone, and it’s like someone smacks me across the face.

  The tall dark shape standing against the sky reminds me of that vertical form I see floating at the edge of my vision, the line or shape that’s lingered out of focus at the corner of my left eye since I got to Port Haven. I don’t know i
f it has to do with the scar across my eyebrow, but sometimes grainy flecks move across the lens. If I ever thought it was just some weird eye problem, seeing this monument now, I’m not so sure.

  From the dark, the darker darkness rises.

  As he tugs out the sheaf of papers from this morning, he taps his cell phone—disobeying what our mom commanded—and Trey, his short-haired friend from class, picks up.

  “So I put the originals back,” Matt whispers. “I don’t think Dad will know I made copies. And I was right. There’s something here no one ever told me. Ever.” He pauses. “Trey?”

  “I’m fine, how are you?” There’s the sound of a smirk in Trey’s voice. I like Trey already, and I sense that Trey has been there for Matt in ways I’ve never been.

  “Sorry, it’s . . .” Matt stops and listens. “Hold on.”

  He sets down the phone, drags the rug to the door, rolls the end over, and gently tucks it against the bottom to block any light or sound. He takes up the phone again.

  “Two things. Of all the dozens of state monuments at Gettysburg, the police found Denis at the Georgia one. I was never told that. They just said Gettysburg and changed the subject.”

  Wait, what? Police? Police found me? What was I doing, just wandering around?

  “They were shielding you from it,” Trey says softly. “How do you tell a seven-year-old they found his brother that way on some old battlefield?”

  Time-out! Found his brother “that way”? What way? What are you two talking about?

  “Yeah, but out of all the states, Georgia!” Matt goes on, as if that’s the important part of what he’s just said. “Dad was born in Georgia. He’s from there! It’s got to be a huge clue.”

  Except, hello—I never went to Gettysburg!

  “And here’s another thing I never knew,” Matt adds. “According to one report, there was a maroon compact car parked on a road about a mile away. Which means the killer carried the bod—carried Denis—all the way across a field to put him at the monument . . .”

  Killer? Body?

  I’m getting sick to the stomach I don’t have.

  “If you have a map, it’s halfway down the Confederate line, between Pitzer Woods and Warfield Ridge,” Matt adds. “Whoever it was had to hike a long way. But why all the trouble? There’s a parking lot right across the road.”

  “Didn’t the cops investigate the Georgia thing?”

  “Yeah, but hardly deep enough. It says, quote, the victim’s father has not returned to Georgia for a period of several years. The victim’s mother has no ties to the state. Other alibis check out. Unquote. That’s it. But, like, I don’t know anything about when my dad lived there. Plus, he was stationed in Georgia in the army. It could be one of his war buddies, getting back at us.”

  My dad was in the army?

  “Your dad was in the army?”

  “You don’t listen, Trey. I told you this. He was in for two years, doing his training at Fort Benning, which is in Georgia. That was a couple of years before he married my mom.”

  “Good lead,” Trey says. “We definitely have to find out more. So did you get in trouble for making the copies?”

  “Eh, not too much. I’m still on Mom’s sort-of good side for my gig at the hospice with the band. I don’t think my dad cares about it so much. Or something. It’s like he’s not here.”

  I can’t read the fine print, but arrayed on Matt’s bed next to the police reports are several yellowed newspapers.

  BUCKWOOD BOY MISSING SINCE SUNDAY

  THIRD GRADER FOUND DEAD AFTER THREE DAYS

  BODY OF SEVEN-YEAR-OLD DISCOVERED AT GETTYSBURG PARK

  COMMUNITY MOURNS LOST TWIN OF PERRY STUDENT

  I shudder to imagine the stories. The police effort, the quickly organized volunteers, the widening scope of the investigation, the innumerable posters of my face tacked up on poles and inside shop windows, the horrifying hours Matt and my parents spent waiting, the bizarre finding of my body, the crushing darkness that fell afterward, all because of me. My memory burns. This is all about me, but I don’t remember any of it. I wasn’t there for it. I’ve been utterly blindsided.

  “Text me a pic of the monument”—Trey yawns—“and my superior mind will study it for clues.”

  “Show you in the morning. Somebody’s coming down the hall. Probably Mom to check on me. Bye.”

  Matt ends the call. I look down over his shoulder at a photograph from the police file. I see my little face, my lifeless body huddled against the base of the Georgia monument. I feel pummeled in the head. I was lost. I was missing. Then my body was found at Gettysburg battlefield three days later? That’s clear across the state from Buckwood!

  Matt quickly stuffs the papers, maps, and books in the box and pushes it under his bed. He switches off the flashlight, tugs the rug back with his heel, and goes still. Mom quietly opens his door, peeks in, closes it.

  I rub my eyebrow as I hear Matt ticking one thought over in his mind.

  Georgia. Georgia. Georgia.

  7

  Remember Me

  I storm away from the grotto and wander the streets of Port Haven, up and down, rolling the whole gruesome mess over in my mind. I’m shocked, stunned, sick in my gut.

  Murdered.

  I was murdered.

  Naturally, GeeGee won’t remember my death. She knows I’m close to my anniversary, but she’s lost most recent history and is getting spottier all the time. But what about the things I remember? Is there something silver about how I died? Where are the yellow leaves, and the dark thing in the corner of my vision? Where was I floating and drowning? A pool? A beach?

  Do all of these visions combine—weave together—to point to my murder?

  When I ask Russell, he says he might have written something down when I first arrived and there may be a clue there, but maybe not, if it wasn’t appropriate for the book he’s trying to write, and anyway he writes very small and scratchily and his eyesight is rather failing so it would take so long to find it that it’s hardly worth looking. I’m paraphrasing here.

  Over the next few days, I become addicted to the grotto, headaching myself inside out as I listen to Matt explain each new thing to Trey.

  How finding the police file flooded everything back to Matt in sobbing, breathless memories. The inhuman crush of reporters at the house. The dumb shock of the neighbor kids, as if their brother was missing, or that it was somehow Matt’s fault, which he almost came to believe. The thousand kind and hopeful and meaningless words from hundreds of people he didn’t know.

  How three full days passed between when I went missing from an amusement park called Funland near a town called Hunker on Sunday, and when some tourist from Atlanta screamed bloody murder at Gettysburg the following Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving.

  How for all the time I was missing, every hour for three days and nights, the light on my porch in Buckwood stayed lit, as if to light me the way home, and how it was turned off when my parents got the call from the police and drove to identify my little body.

  How the weather on the day the police found me, and the previous days, had been clear and dry in Gettysburg, but my clothes were wet, with a sour, musty smell, which suggested to the police that I wasn’t killed near the battlefield.

  How the coroner decided the condition of my body put my actual death on Tuesday—the day before I was found and two days after I went missing. How besides my broken neck, they’d found “nonlethal bruising” on my shoulders and head, and I had recently lost a tooth.

  Over the days, I can’t help studying the police file that Matt copied in the teachers’ lounge, and each time I’m stricken to see my young self—seven-year-old Denis Richard Egan, sitting with my back against the monument, my face tilted up, eyes closed, my right cheek on the base’s top edge. Except for the strange angle of my head, it looked like I was simply tired, had just paused to rest, and had fallen asleep.

  “There’s something else,” Matt tells Trey one night o
n the phone, “that nobody but my parents and the police know about. Denis had only one shoe on.”

  One shoe!

  “He’s wearing one sneaker. His right foot is bare. His sole had been scraped, but the bruises had been cleaned, the coroner said, and one cut even had a bandage on it.”

  “Wow . . . ,” Trey whispers. “Why didn’t that get into the papers?”

  “The police must have thought it could lead them to the killer. Dad was probably crazy about it, how it was another clue,” Matt whispers, then adds, “The police never found his sneaker.”

  I stare at the photographs and cry. Yes, the dead can cry. My seven-year-old body looks so frail set against the big hulking monument. It was a frigid morning when I was found, but the sun was out, and the sky was as blue as sapphire, one newspaper said.

  Matt spreads other file photos out on his bed. Police cars and emergency vans parked askew on the grass. Tall screens angled around me. Medical personnel with paper shoe covers.

  “The whole investigation went cold,” Matt says, “until two months ago. It was bizarre here at the time. My parents knew, but I never got the full story until now. Listen.”

  Matt unfolds another newspaper, from this past July, and he reads it out to Trey. The gist is that a couple of teenagers were swimming in an abandoned limestone quarry near the Youghiogheny River. One of the boys dove off a rock, hooting and laughing—I can almost hear him doing that. His name was Brendan, but his friends and parents call him Bo. Bo took a running leap at the middle of the pond and broke his ankle when he crashed into something under the surface. He was all right, on crutches for two months, but when the police investigated, they found the rusted hulk of an old maroon Honda submerged in the quarry.

  Hearing about it on the news, the Buckwood cop assigned to my case, Detective Edwin Sparn, looked back into the almost-five-year-old cold case because he remembered that the car seen early that morning parked on Millerstown Road in Gettysburg was described as “a maroon compact.”