I looked down, wanting to break free of this vision, knowing that in another moment or two it wouldn’t be anything so distant as a vision but as real as the trip Kyra and I had made to the Fryeburg Fair. Instead of a plastic owl with gold-ringed eyes, I was looking at a child with bright
blue ones. She was sitting on a picnic table, holding out her chubby arms and crying. I saw her as clearly as I saw my own face in the mirror each morning when I shaved. I saw she was about Kyra’s age but much plumper, and her hair is black instead of blonde. Her hair is the shade her brother’s will remain until it finally begins to go gray in the impossibly distant summer of 1998, a year she will never see unless someone gets her out of this hell. She wears a white dress and red knee-stockings and she holds her arms out to me, calling Daddy, Daddy.
I start toward her and then there is a blast of organized heat that tears me apart for a moment —
I am the ghost here, I realize, and Fred Dean has just run right through me. Daddy, she cries, but to him, not me. Daddy! and she hugs him, unmindful of the soot smearing her white silk dress and her chubby face as he kisses her and more soot begins to fall and the loons beat their way in toward shore, seeming to weep in shrill lamentation.
Daddy the fire is coming! she cries as he scoops her into his arms.
I know, be brave, he says. We’re gonna be all right, sugarplum, but you have to be brave.
The fire isn’t just coming,’ it has come. The entire east end of Halo Bay is inflames and now they’re moving this way, eating one by one the little cabins where the men like to lay up drunk in hunting season and ice-fishing season. Behind Al LeRoux’s, the washing Marguerite hung out that morning is in flames, pants and dresses and underwear burning on lines which are themselves strings of fire. Leaves and bark shower down,’ a burning ember touches Carla’s neck and she shrieks with pain. Fred slaps it away as he carries her down the slope of land to the water.
Don’t do it! I scream. I know all this is beyond my power to change, but I scream at him anyway, try to change it anyway. Fight it! For Christ’s sake, fight it!
Daddy, who is that man? Carla asks, and points at me as the green-shingled roof of the Dean place catches fire.
Fred glances toward where she is pointing, and in his face I see a spasm of guilt. He knows what he’s doing, that’s the terrible thing — way down deep he knows exactly what he is doing here at Halo Bay where The Street ends. He knows and he’s afraid that someone will witness his work. But he sees nothing.
Or does he? There is a momentary doubtful widening of the eyes as if he does spy something — a dancing helix of air, perhaps. Or does feel me? Is that it? Does he feel a momentary cold draft in all this heat? One that feels like protesting hands, hands that would restrain if they only had substance? Then he looks away,’ then he is wading into the water beside the Deans’ stub of a dock.
Fred! I scream. For God’s sake, man, look at her! Do you think your wife put her in a white silk dress by accident? Is that anyone’s idea of a play-dress?
Daddy, why are we going in the water? she asks.
To get away from the fire, sugarplum.
Daddy, I can’t swim!
You won’t have to, he replies, and what a chill I feel at that! Because it’s no lie — she won’t have to swim, not now, not ever. And at least Fred’s way will be more merciful than Normal Auster’s when Normal’s turn comes — more merciful than the squalling handpump, the gallons of freezing water.
Her white dress floats around her like a lily. Her red stockings shimmer in the water. She hugs his neck tightly and now they are among the fleeing loons,’ the loons spank the water with their powerful wings, churning up curds of jam and staring at the man and the girl with their distraught red eyes. The air is heavy with smoke and the sky is gone. I stagger after them, wading — I can feel the cold of the water, although I don’t splash and leave no wake. The eastern and northern edges of the lake are both on fire now there is a burning crescent around us as Fred Dean wades deeper
with his daughter, carrying her as if to some baptismal rite. And still he tells himself he is trying to save her, only to save her, just as all her life Hilda will tell herself that the child just wandered back to the cottage to look for a toy, that she was not left behind on purpose, left in her white dress and red stockings to be found by her father, who once did something unspeakable. This is the past, this is the Land of Ago, and here the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, even unto the seventh generation, which is not yet.
He takes her deeper and she begins to scream. Her screams mingle with the screams of the loons until he stops the sound with a kiss upon her terrified mouth. ‘Love you, Daddy loves his sugarplum,’ he says, and then lowers her. It is to be a full-immersion baptism, then, except there is no shorebank choir singing ‘Shall We Gather at the River’ and no one shouting Hallelujah! and he is not letting her come back up. She struggles furiously in the white bloom of her sacrificial dress, and after a moment he cannot bear to watch her,’ he looks across the lake instead, to the west where the fire hasn’t yet touched (and never will), to the west where skies are still blue. Ash sifts around him like black rain and the tears pour out of his eyes and as she struggles furiously beneath his hands, trying to free herself from his drowning grip, he tells himself It was an accident, just a terrible accident, I took her out in the lake because it was the only place I could take her, the only place left, and she panicked, she started to struggle, she was all wet and all slippery and I lost my good hold on her and then I lost any hold on her and then —
I forget I’m a ghost. I scream ‘Kia! Hold on, Ki!’ and dive. I reach her, I see her terrified face, her bulging blue eyes, her rosebud of a mouth which is trailing a silver line of bubbles toward the surface where Fred stands in water up to his neck, holding her down while he tells himself over and over that he was trying to save her, it was the only way, he was trying to save her, it was the only way. I reach for her, again and again I reach for her, my child, my daughter, my Kia (they are all Kia, the boys as well as the girls, all my daughter), and each time my arms go through her. Worse
— oh, far worse — is that now she is reaching for ‘me’ , her dappled arms floating out, begging for rescue. Her groping hands melt through mine. I cannot touch, because now I am the ghost. I am the ghost and as her struggles weaken I realize that I can’t I can’t oh I couldn’t breathe — I was drowning.
I doubled over, opened my mouth, and this time a great spew of lake-water came out, soaking the plastic owl which lay on the pallet by my knees. I hugged the JO’S NOTIONS box to my chest, not wanting the contents to get wet, and the movement triggered another retch. This time cold water poured from my nose as well as my mouth. I dragged in a deep breath, then coughed it out.
‘This has got to end,’ I said, but of course this was the end, one way or the other. Because Kyra was last.
I climbed up the steps to the studio and sat on the littered floor to get my breath. Outside, the thunder boomed and the rain fell, but I thought the storm had passed its peak of fury. Or maybe I only hoped.
I rested with my legs hanging down through the trap — there were no more ghosts here to touch my ankles, I don’t know how I knew that but I did — and stripped off the rubber bands holding the steno notebooks together. I opened the first one, paged through it, and saw it was almost filled with Jo’s handwriting and a number of folded typed sheets (Courier type, of course), single-spaced: the fruit of all those clandestine trips down to the TR during 1993 and 1994. Fragmentary notes, for the most part, and transcriptions of tapes which might still be down below me in the storage space somewhere. Tucked away with the VCR or the eight-track player, perhaps. But I didn’t need them.