Hitchers

“Hell, yes.” He was prodding, and I thought I knew why. “It was like I was watching from behind someone else’s eyes, seeing what they were seeing.”

Mick slapped the table, pointed at me, shouted, “That’s exactly what happened to me.” He didn’t seem to care that people were glancing his way. “Christ, I’m not off my head.”

“What did you see?” I asked.

Mick pressed his hands to his face. “I was inside my ex-wife, Blossom.” He lowered his voice. “She was, you know, having a romp with her latest beau.” He made a sour face. “So there I am, dead, inside my wife while this bloke Peter is also inside her, in a manner of speaking. It was a miserable four or five minutes. Absolute torture.”

The pain in Mick’s expression made me grin.

“Oh, sure, laugh. You didn’t have to go through it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t smiling at what happened, just your expression.”

“It’s all fixed, I’m telling ya. They vote for their friends, ” I added. The elderly woman who had been talking to Mick during his first outburst dropped her fork onto her plate. Struggling not to stare she scooped the napkin out of her lap and pressed it against her mouth.

Mick ignored it completely. He gestured at me with his chin. “How about you, eh?”

I described what I’d seen in Lyndsay’s apartment.

“Do you suppose this is connected to the voices?” Mick asked when I’d finished. He waved to get the waitress’s attention, pointed to his empty drink.

“I’ve thought about that. Maybe we’re somehow still connected to the people we were inside. The problem is, some of the things I say are about people I know, but this woman doesn’t. I just don’t see how she fits in.”

“Right, right,” Mick said. “That doesn’t work.” His eyes took on an empty glaze, and he added, “I’ve got to get it perfect. It’s got to be perfect.” Ignoring the stares, Mick swirled his drink, gazed thoughtfully into the glass.

His suggestion got me thinking. I had been focusing on mundane explanations for the voice—a physical illness that had screwed me up neurologically, or a psychological problem. But there were those few moments when I was dead, how I learned the attack originated in the subway. Maybe I was looking for answers in the wrong places. What happened when I was dead didn’t have a logical explanation, so why should the voices?

Mick looked at his watch. “I’d best get going.”

I felt a wash of disappointment.

“Let’s keep in touch,” he added as he pulled a bill from his wallet, “compare notes on how this thing plays out, yeah?”

I told him I thought that was a good idea.

“I got this,” he said, pointing at our plates. “Good choice, by the way. Top-shelf pancakes.” Our waitress was behind the counter; Mick went right on back there without hesitation, put a hand on her shoulder as he fished a bill out of his wallet. She laughed at something he said, and that feeling washed over me again, a longing to talk to her. Once I figured out how to stop the vocalizations, I planned to return to the Blue Boy often.

CHAPTER 12

The granite steps outside Corinne’s building looked blurry from the tears I’d shed during our session. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve, hoping no one would notice.

Digging up these memories is painful, Corinne had said at the end of the session, but it’s like digging up a splinter: you’ll feel better once it’s out. The thing was, I felt like I’d already dug up and reburied Kayleigh’s and Lorena’s deaths a thousand times.

I tried not to set Kayleigh’s and Lorena’s deaths side-by-side and examine the similarities. One at a time was plenty. Sometimes it was hard to resist, though. They were the two most important people in my life, both died on water, and I carried legitimate blame—and terrible guilt—in both cases.

You hear about people who are racked with guilt because they created some benign circumstance that led to the death of a loved one. A woman sends her husband to the store for eggs to finish a batch of brownies, and he’s crushed by a semi on the way home. She finds broken eggshells scattered in the car, and thinks, If only I hadn’t sent him to the store he’d still be alive. I wish I had to go through such a contorted string of logic to assign myself blame for Kayleigh’s and Lorena’s deaths.

I don’t assign myself all the blame. Sometimes I think I’m more to blame for Kayleigh’s death than Lorena’s; at other times I give myself a partial pass on Kayleigh’s because I was only twelve, and then I think I’m more to blame for Lorena’s. Both had to take some of the blame themselves, although they weren’t around to do so. It’s difficult to apportion blame. It’s not an exact science.

Sometimes I wondered what my life would be like if I had backed down from Kayleigh’s dare to jump off that pier. If I hadn’t jumped, Kayleigh wouldn’t have had reason to stay behind on that awful night and try to prove she could do it, too. What would I have done with all of that mental space taken up by guilt?

Lorena’s Toyota unlocked with a cheerful bleep-bleep and I hopped in.

I was beginning to wonder how any of this was connected to the voice. I was blurting more than ever; maybe I was digging up all of these painful memories for nothing. Goodness knows I had enough, more recent painful shit to deal with without digging through my past for more.

I turned on the radio to get an update on suffering that put my petty grievances to shame.

The six hundred thousandth victim had been counted. Anyone who hadn’t known the population of greater Atlanta before the attack certainly knew it by now. Five million. More than one in nine Atlantans had died. Entire families had been wiped out. Entire blocks, almost. With those six hundred thousand victims had gone all laughter, all joy. The people I passed looked grim, tired. All business. On the plus side the traffic was thinner, the other drivers less ruthless. There was the occasional honk, but it was nothing like the incessant hooting and bleating that had been the background Muzak of the city’s downtown both night and day.

“Come here, ya monkey, ya, ” my unwanted voice opined. Jesus, that was vintage Grandpa. I could picture him saying that as he chased a six-year-old Kayleigh around the yard with hedge clippers, pretending he was going to cut off her toes while she giggled and screeched.

There was no mention of the blurting illness on the news. If my neurologist had seen five cases, there must be thousands, but it would be hard for another story to break through when there was the anthrax story to cover 24/7.

As I pulled onto West Marietta I turned off the news. Enough of this dreariness. I should pick up something cheerful for lunch and eat it while watching last night’s episode of The Big Bang Theory on DVR.

Then I remembered that I’d agreed to visit Grandma this afternoon. I let my head slump until my forehead bumped the steering wheel. “Damn it. Damn it.” I needed time to acclimate to the idea of a visit to Grandma’s, and by forgetting, I’d missed my acclimation period.

Moaning in pointless protest I took a left on Howell Mill and headed for Grandma’s house.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Grandma, she was just hard to talk to. Sitting on her couch, time crawled in super slow-mo. There were so many things she didn’t talk about: politics, religion, relatives’ private business, her childhood, sports, feelings, failures, anything bad. The list bordered on infinite. What she liked to discuss was the gruesome but impersonal goings-on depicted on the TV news. She liked to shake her head and tisk. She also liked to talk about how there was nothing on television any more, and about delicious meals from days gone by. I braced myself for two hours of pain.

I’d warned her about the problem I was having with my voice. She suggested I might be coming down with the flu. It hadn’t happened while I was on the phone with her, and there was no way anyone could grasp how utterly freaky it was unless they heard it. And Grandma would hear it. The outbursts were getting worse—I was up to thirty since I’d waked that morning. So that was another concern—I didn’t want to give her a heart attack.

I was even doing it in my sleep now. I’d wake up four or five times a night, jolted from sleep by that voice. I worried they would keep getting worse until my speech was one long nonsensical rant comprised of things my grandfather might say. I’d be forced to communicate like a deaf mute, writing down what I wanted to say, or using