Page 99 of The Winter People
I’ve got a wedding to shoot in Cambridge. I should be home in time for dinner.
And in front of him, his last meal. A turkey club sandwich and cup of coffee. Not an exciting meal, but she knew it was Gary’s favorite—his standard order at diners and truck stops—and it pleased her to be reminded that the Gary who sat in Lou Lou’s that day was the same Gary she’d known all along.
Using a superfine paintbrush, she applied a dab of glue to the back side of the tiny map, and reached in with a pair of long tweezers to stick it onto the table, beside Gary. The map he’d followed to get to West Hall, to the hill, and to the Devil’s Hand, where he’d photographed a little girl who’d been dead over one hundred years.
As she smoothed the Gary doll’s white shirt, she imagined that last conversation: Alice begged him to forget everything he’d discovered, to let it go. And Gary, who had been walking around for the past two years dazed and furious and full of pain over the seemingly impossible loss of his son, thought only of Austin—that if there was the slightest chance to have him back, even if only for seven days, he’d give anything for that.
How bright and full of wonder and magic the world must have seemed to Gary on that last day as he sat in Lou Lou’s Café. That he lived in a world where it was possible for the dead to awaken and walk again—what a miraculous discovery! What hope he must have felt, glowing all warm inside him.
And had he thought of Katherine, of what her face might look like if he brought their son home to her once more? How pleased she’d be. How amazed.
“I understand,” Katherine said out loud, stroking the little doll’s head. “I understand why you did what you did. I’m just sorry you didn’t tell me any of it.” And then, because she needed to say them, needed to say the words out loud and feel their weight leave her once and for all, she added, “I forgive you.”
She closed the door of the café, leaving them to circle through that conversation again and again: Alice trying to convince Gary to forget the whole thing, Gary telling her he just couldn’t.
Behind Katherine, a small sound.
A scratching at the front door to the apartment, as if a dog or cat wanted to be let in.
She rose from the stool, floated across the room, and paused for a moment, her hand on the doorknob.
Her heart sang.
Gary.
Sara
July 4, 1939
Independence Day
The midnight trips to town have grown more difficult. My eyesight is failing. My bones and joints ache all the time. The other day, I caught sight of my own reflection in the stream and did not recognize the thin old woman who looked back at me. When did my hair become so gray? My face so heavily lined with wrinkles?
It pains me to think of what will happen to my beloved Gertie when I am gone. She will go on living forever. My time in this world is limited.
And, as old as she may get in years, she is still only a child and makes a child’s plans and choices.
Who will be here to keep her company, to help her control her impulses, once I am gone?
“Are there others?” she wrote into my hand one night not long ago. “Others like me?”
I was not sure how to answer. I had reflected on the question before, and decided that surely, in all the years people had been making sleepers, she could not have been the only one to spill blood. “There might be,” I told her. “But if there are, they are well hidden.”
Secretly, I pray she is the only one.
It seems that she needs to feed every few months. She grows angry and withdrawn, then weak, and we must venture out in search of food. I have brought her squirrels, fish, even a deer onoccasion. (How ironic that the hunting and trapping skills taught to me so long ago by Auntie are the very skills that have enabled us to survive.) I leave the offerings outside the cave and go take a long walk while she feeds. She does not wish me to watch (nor am I able to stomach it). The truth of it is, the animals I bring do not satiate her. What she longs for most (how I shudder to write it!) is human blood.
I have brought her this, too.
I shall not share the details of my crimes here—they are too horrific to mention. Suffice it to say that if there is a Hell, the Hell Reverend Ayers always warned us of in his sermons, that is where I belong, where they will find me in the end.
It shames me to say it, to confess all that I have done, but Gertie is, after all, my creation.
My child by birth, and my sleeper awakened.
