Revival

“Yes. And I’d love to buy into it.”

Of course I would. Anyone would. Because every man and woman owes a death, and the thought of going to the place I saw has done more than cast a shadow over my life; it has made that life seem thin and unimportant. No—not just my life, every life. So I hang on to one thought. It’s my mantra, the first thing I tell myself in the morning and the last thing I tell myself at night.

Mother lied.

Mother lied.

Mother lied.

Sometimes I almost believe it . . . but there are reasons I can’t quite manage to do so.

There are signs.

 • • •

Before going back to Nederland—where I would discover that Hugh had killed himself after murdering Bree’s mother—I drove to the home place in Harlow. There were two reasons for this. After Jacobs’s body was discovered, the police might get in touch with me and ask for an accounting of my time in Maine. That seemed important (although in the end, they never did), but something else was more important: I needed the comfort of a familiar place, and people who loved me.

I didn’t get it.

You remember Cara Ly

“What the hell’s that about?” he asked, half-humorously. “Last time you were here, she couldn’t get enough of you.”

“Don’t know,” I said, but of course I did. I had hoped to stay a night, perhaps two, sucking up normality the way a vampire sucks blood, but that wasn’t going to work. I didn’t know exactly what Cara Ly

I told Terry I’d just stopped by to say hello, couldn’t even stay for supper, had a plane to catch in Portland. I’d been in Lewiston, I said, slop-recording a band Norm Irving had told me about. He said he thought they had national potential.

“And do they?” he asked.

“Nah. Strictly lo-fi.” I made a business of looking at my watch.

“Never mind the plane,” Terry said. “You can catch another one. Come on in and have di

I didn’t think so.

I told Terry I had recording gigs at Wolfjaw that I absolutely could not miss. I told him another time. And when he held out his arms to me, I hugged him hard, knowing chances were good I’d never see him again. I didn’t know about the murders and suicides then, but I knew I was carrying something poisonous, and would probably carry it for the rest of my life. The last thing I wanted was to infect the people I loved.

On the way back to my rental car, I stopped and looked at the dirt strip between the lawn and Methodist Road. The road had been paved for years, but the strip of dirt looked just as it had when I used to play there with the toy soldiers my sister gave me for my sixth birthday. I had been kneeling there and playing with them one day in the fall of 1962, when a shadow fell over me.

That shadow is still there.

 • • •

“Have you murdered anyone?”

Ed Braithwaite has asked me this question on several occasions. It is, I believe, what’s called incremental repetition. I always smile and tell him no. It’s true that I put four bullets into poor Mary Fay, but the woman was already dead at the time, and Charles Jacobs died of a final cataclysmic stroke. If it hadn’t happened that day, it would have happened on another, and probably before the year was out.

“And you obviously haven’t committed suicide,” Ed continues, smiling himself. “Unless I’m hallucinating you, that is.”

“You’re not.”

“The impulse isn’t there?”

“No.”

“Not even as a theoretical possibility? One that comes to you in the dead of night, perhaps, when you can’t sleep?”

“No.”

My life these days is far from happy, but the antidepressants have put a floor under me. Suicide isn’t on my radar. And given what may come after death, I want to live as long as possible. There’s something else, too. I feel—rightly or wrongly—that I have a lot to atone for. Because of that, I’m still trying to be a do-right daddy. I cook at the Harbor House soup kitchen on Aupupu Street. I volunteer two days a week at the Goodwill on Keolu Drive, next to the Nene Goose Bakery. If you’re dead, you can’t atone for anything.

“Tell me, Jamie—why are you the special lemming who feels no urge to jump off the cliff? Why are you immune?”

I just smile and shrug. I could tell him, but he wouldn’t believe me. Mary Fay was Mother’s door into our world, but I was the key. Shooting a corpse kills nothing—not that an immortal being such as Mother can be killed—but when I fired that pistol, I locked the door. I said no with more than my mouth. If I told my shrink that some otherworldly being, one of the Great Ones, was saving me for some final and apocalyptic act of revenge because of that no, said shrink might begin thinking about involuntary committal. I don’t want that, because I have another duty, one I consider far more important than helping out at Harbor House or sorting clothes at the Goodwill.

 • • •

At the end of each session with Ed, I pay his receptionist by check. I can afford to do this because the itinerant rock guitarist turned recording engineer is now a wealthy man. Ironic, isn’t it? Hugh Yates died without issue, and left a substantial fortune (handed down from his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather) behind. There were many small bequests, including gifts of cash to Malcolm “Mookie” McDonald and Hillary Katz (aka Pagan Starshine), but a large part of the estate was to be divided between me and Georgia Donlin.

Given Georgia’s death at Hugh’s hands, that particular bequest could have provided probate attorneys with twenty years’ worth of legal munching and tasty fees, but since there was no one to kick up dickens (I certainly wasn’t going to), there was no wrangle. Hugh’s lawyers got in touch with Bree and told her that, as the deceased was her mother, she arguably had a valid claim on the loot.

Only Bree wouldn’t argue. The lawyer who handled my end of the business told me Bree claimed Hugh’s money was “tainted.” Perhaps so, but I had no compunctions about taking my share of it. Partly because I played no part in Hugh’s cure, mostly because I consider myself tainted already, and feel it’s better to be tainted in comfort than in poverty. I have no idea what happened to the several million that would have gone to Georgia, and have no desire to find out. Too much knowledge isn’t good for a person. I know that now.

 • • •

When my twice-weekly session is finished and my bill is paid, I leave Ed Braithwaite’s outer office. Beyond is a wide carpeted hall lined with other offices. A right turn would take me back to the lobby, and from the lobby to Kuulei Road. But I don’t turn right. I turn left. Finding Ed was just happenstance, you see; I originally came to the Brandon L. Martin Psychiatric Center on other business.

I walk down the hallway, then cross the fragrant, beautifully maintained garden that is the green heart of this large facility. Here patients sit taking the reliable Hawaiian sun. Many are fully dressed, some are in pajamas or nightgowns, a few (recent arrivals, I believe) wear hospital joh