 "Hold Me Forever, Daddy"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick
If anyone could have gone back ten years
and asked Jack Meader three specific questions, he would have answered
that no, he didn’t believe in anything supernatural; yes, he’d be able to
get over even the powerful trauma of losing a child, even in a brutal
fashion; and no, he could care less about attending the birth of his own
child. He began unlearning those ideas when his daughter came along.
Jack fell unconditionally, irrevocably in
love with Kimberly Dawn the first moment he laid eyes on her. Nine months
of planning had failed to bore through his male ego. He thought he was
ready, but when he held the baby’s head gently in his hands, supporting
the neck as she endured the hellish exodus from the confines of her
mother’s womb, Jack underwent an instant metamorphosis of sorts.
Judy had timidly declared her pregnancy
to him on Valentine’s Day with a happy pink and white card, her
handwritten note inside dropping the bomb. Jack had been dumbfounded. They
were well-enough off, of course, with his job of twelve years tending the
expansive Faith Hill Cemetery paying a respectable salary and Judy doing
her private computer consultation business from home. They lived in a
low-mortgage house on land bordering the cemetery and had long ago filled
it with little feet. Patrick, just turned nine that past cold January, and
Eddie, going on six.
It had been so long since a baby had
graced their home that Jack wasn’t sure if he could remember what it was
like. Judy, worried sick watching his blank stare at the card, had burst
into sobs before he could compose himself and go to her. He was pleased
she was pregnant, he had told her. They could deal with it, he had said.
Within minutes, he had calmed her and she was bouncing and happy again.
In truth, while Jack wasn’t upset about
the situation, he really wasn’t excited about it, either. The baby was
coming, and he would work with that; but in contrast to Judy’s solid nine
months of preparation -- shopping for clothes and accessories, knitting
things, redecorating her study to be part nursery -- Jack was pretty laid
back about it. It was, after all, just another baby. He’d love the child
and rear her well, but like he used to tell everyone through his first two
kids, they just didn’t even become interesting people until at least age
six.
“All they do is piss and shit and cry and
eat and puke all day,” he told Al Danbury, his assistant groundsman at
Faith Hill. “They’re ugly to begin with, squashed little faces and bad
hairdos, can’t even dress themselves or carry on a decent conversation.
Six years old, Al -- not til then.”
The ultrasounds told them she was,
indeed, going to be a girl, although Jack never accompanied Judy to the
OB. He could never see anything in those ultrasound pictures anyway, he
had argued with her over all three pregnancies. Her sister Beth coached
her in the birthing classes, all the silly breathing things. Just another
routine procreation as far as he was concerned.
* *
*
Judy was seven months into her pregnancy
-- her five-foot-two frame looked like a beachball with legs -- when Jack
was wisecracking over the whole thing with Al while preparing to mow the
entire southwest corner of the cemetery. Al, accustomed to Jack’s
disinterest, mentioned something that altered Jack on the spot.
“I delivered my two children,” Al said.
“Yeah, I was there for Patrick and
Eddie,” Jack replied, tightening the clamps holding the monstrous catcher
bag to the gargantuan mower. “Held Judy’s hand, told her everything was
gonna be all right, and listened to her cussin’ and swearin’ at me like a
sailor while she popped ‘em out.”
“No, I mean I actually delivered them
both. Annie Lynne and Billy, both of them. Out they came and I caught ‘em.”
Jack was a bit stunned. “No doctor?”
“Well, a-course. But I was there, playing
catcher behind the plate. Caught their heads and helped ‘em out.”
Jack leaned against the big mower,
pulling off his Boise Cascade baseball cap and scratching his head
thoughtfully as he watched Al working on the other side of the mower bag.
“Don’t mean to be disrespectful, Al,” he said, “but why in God’s green
garden would you wanna do that?”
“Well, I’ll tell ya,” Al said, “I figured
I got between her legs and filled her full of those kids in the top of the
first, there’s no right reason at all I shouldn’t be standing back between
them in the bottom of the ninth. With her crying and screaming on that
table, in pain and an absolute mess down there, seemed the least I could
do.”
Jack stood silently, pondering his
friend’s words. Al said, “I’ll tell you, Jack, there’s nothing like it.
You try it with this little girl of yours. You see that little head poking
out and squashed up like a Nerf football, and you take charge of her tiny
little life. You’re her only God then, the only salvation from the hell
she’s escaping, bringing her into this world. You stand down there, you do
what I say, and you’ll never look at any of your kids the same way again.”
* *
*
Judy nearly fell over when Jack told her
of his plans. He was all smiles and she barely believed him. She surely
hoped for him to have been reborn, ready to go to the classes and doctor
appointments, but he made it clear that wasn’t happening. She was happy
enough knowing he wanted to take the responsibility he was taking.
* *
*
It was a rainy September morning when
Judy went into labor with a vengeance. From nothing at all to die-hard
contractions that lasted minutes at a pop, her water broke and she was
screaming. Jack rushed her to Eastern Maine Medical Center, just a handful
of miles down the road in Bangor, and made it just in time. Her feet were
barely in the stirrups and the doctor was checking up inside her and
announcing she was at the infamous ten centimeter dilation point; the baby
was coming any second. He was familiar with Jack and Judy’s birth plan and
had Jack move to his position.
The doc talked all the way through, but
it was so much background noise to Jack. He saw the thin covering of
light, downy hair as the baby’s wet head appeared, Beth somewhere up at
the other end of the mother telling the woman to PUSH, and the sense of
awe that filled him was one he thought could never be surpassed -- except
that it was surpassed by the next moment, and then the next, and so on,
all throughout the birthing.
It happened fast, but Jack could remember
it all in slow-motion: the head popping out, shoulders following, and a
good, final PUSH from Judy left the baby completely in Jack’s hands, so to
speak. He heard the first helpless gurgling cry escape her newborn lips
and his entire world exploded around him. Months of jokes with Al about
catcher’s mitts and fastballs and called strikes hadn’t begun to prepare
him for the moment. There were simply no words for the torrent of feelings
he was experiencing. All he knew was that he didn’t want to let the nurse
take the baby from him to clean her up, and that he could never feel
better about anything else in his life ever again.
* *
*
He was wrong. Every day he felt the same
feelings. Every day he felt like he was bringing her into the world. He
couldn’t say that he loved Kimberly Dawn more than Patrick or Eddie, but
he felt a powerful relationship with her that he had not known with his
sons. He fed her, bathed her, changed her, every day -- something he had
never taken a particular interest in with the first two. He was there to
coax her into crawling and there for her first steps – indeed, she
wouldn’t walk for anyone else for the longest time. “It’s the strangest
thing,” Judy would tell Beth or her mother, “but Kimmy will not walk for
anyone but Jack. She’ll crawl, you know how she does, sort of hiking her
butt along the floor, and cry when I try to get her to stand. But you get
Jack on the other side of the room and that girl will get to her feet and
stagger around like a drunk flamingo, doing anything to get to him. She
tries to please him, you know. All smiles, shining eyes -- a Daddy’s girl,
no doubt about it.”
Kimmy would cry for Daddy when her
brothers were bothering her or when she was angry about bedtime or when
she was hurt. She knew by the time she could sit up what time Daddy was
home from work at night, and if he were late she would become troubled and
whining. She would screech with happiness when he would come home for
lunch on rainy days and cry for half an hour when he would leave.
* *
*
At two she burned her hand when she fell
against the range; Judy was cooking a turkey dinner in the oven and the
metal was mighty hot. Jack was in Bangor picking up building supplies as
Judy rushed Kimmy to the hospital. She screamed and wailed and cried for
her Daddy, all the way there, all the while the ER nurses cleaned up the
burn, all the while the doctor examined her.
Judy paged Jack on his alphanumeric pager
and he flew like the wind to EMMC, leaving his purchases, his credit card,
and even his wallet right there at the checkout. The moment he burst into
the examination room, Kimmy’s tears stopped, her crying ceased, and she
wrapped her little arms about her Daddy’s neck and sobbed quietly, saying
“Daddy” over and over. The burn was still there, and the nurse still had
to remove the dead skin and bandage it with plenty of stinging ointment,
but she never winced while Daddy held her. All the while, he spoke softly
to her, telling her he would hold her forever and ever. She knew her daddy
would never lie; what he said was as true as the sky was blue.
* *
*
At three and a half, she had her first
nightmare. She woke, screaming, and Jack came off his pillow and flew like
a streaking cruise missile homing in on its target. He exploded into her
bedroom amidst wails and tears and screaming and scooped her up like
Superman rescuing a kitten from the midst of a typhoon. She muckled onto
him and he rocked her for five solid minutes, feeling her wracking sobs
subside little by little as her tiny body trembled against him. When she
was finally able to speak, she did so in a shaking voice, looking up with
wet blue eyes that gleamed in the moonlight. She talked in kid sentences,
but he got the gist of it: she was running away from a monster with two
mouths and lots of teeth. No matter where she ran, the ground was sticky
and she couldn’t run very fast. The monster was slavering and growling and
drooling slime, just about to snap her up in its dual maws, when she woke.
“Daddy,” she said amidst sniffles and
residual tears, “I couldn’t find you when the monster was chasing me.”
“It was just a bad dream, Punkin,” he
told her with a bright smile.
“But I needed you,” she said pleadingly.
His heart almost fell but apparently
found one rib to hang on to. “Well, you just didn’t dream Daddy into your
dream this time,” he said. “All you have to do is dream me right in there.
Cuz as long as I’m in your dreams, or here in the real world, Punkin --
Daddy will always be there for you.”
She sniffled a bit of runny nose that was
going on. “Do you promise forever?”
“Of course I do!” he said, cupping her
tiny, fragile head between his heads and ruffling her hair and ears.
“Daddy will always be there for you.”
* *
*
From age three on, she absolutely could
not go to sleep without Daddy reading her a bedtime story -- or telling
her one he spun of whole cloth on the spot, or even just sitting with her
at bedtime and telling her he loved her. Such was the nature of the love
between a father and a daughter, Pastor Bentley from the church had told
them, when God’s hands brought them together. Jack didn’t know anything
about that. He just knew he loved her to pieces, and no job, no
responsibility, no person on all the Earth would keep him from his darling
baby daughter.
Kimberly grew more beautiful as the years
passed. Her bright blond hair danced in pretty pigtails through
kindergarten. First grade saw the hair beginning to darken a bit; her
eyes, in contrast, sparkled brighter. The pigtails were lost to a
naturally fluffy, dirty-blond cascade by the end of the school year, she
in the midst of being seven years old. She was just three and a half feet
tall and, as Al always told her, “prettier than a pink bow on an Easter
dress.”
* *
*
It was earlier that school year, just
before that seventh birthday, that she had taken notice of a popular
murder all over the media. Although she didn’t resemble Jon-Benet Ramsey,
many people commented that Kimmy’s beauty and innocence reminded them of
the young Colorado girl who had been murdered in 1996. Kimmy had caught a
news report shortly after that event and had immediately become glued to
the television. She was six then, about the age Jon-Benet had been, and
her attentiveness to the horrible murder investigation concerned Jack and
Judy a bit. They would catch her watching the TV and hurriedly change the
channel, but always she had been engrossed in the story too far at that
point.
Questions inevitably arose. Jack was
munching popcorn with her one October night in front of the television
when a news break mentioned a new development in the Ramsey case.
Kimberly calmly said amidst a mouthful of
popcorn, “They think her parents killed her.”
“Well, thinking doesn’t make it so,
Punkin,” he told her.
“You know what Jon-Benet’s problem was?”
the little girl asked knowingly.
“Well, her problem was that she was
killed,” Jack said gently, not even quite sure how to proceed in the
conversation.
“Nope,” Kimberly said, stuffing in more
popcorn. “Her Daddy didn’t love her enough. He never promised to always be
there when she needed him. If he did,” she said in lower tones, through a
mouthful, “he would have stopped the person who killed her.”
Jack was stunned to silence as the little
girl leaned her little head against his chest and under his arm, snuggling
up close to her thunderbolt-wielding Zeus, content in the truth of her
observation and knowing fully well that the crook under her Daddy’s arm
was the safest place in the entire universe.
* *
*
Kimberly Dawn was murdered eight months
later.
The State Police Crime Lab went over the
case for months in order to reconstruct the ordeal through which the
little girl had suffered. Most of the details came from the surviving
member of the assault – Eddie, Kimberly’s older brother, thirteen at the
time. He had left school and hung out with his buddies for an hour before
meeting up with Kimberly, who was escaping the first grade into the early
June sunshine. They often walked home together instead of taking the bus,
since shortcutting across a back field found off-road dirtbike trails.
From there, it was less than ten minutes to the back side of the cemetery
of which Jack Meader served as caretaker.
It was when they emerged from the woods
trail on the far side of the vast graveyard, Eddie told the investigators,
that they ran into the dirty, scraggly-faced white guy and the Hispanic
with his left eye swollen shut. It wasn’t uncommon for Jack to come home
with stories of transients smoking dope in the back of the cemetery, and
not unusual for summer help to be popping in about that time of year
anyway, so Eddie hadn’t thought much of the two. All the same, Eddie said
that he felt a bit uneasy.
“Where you kids goin’?” the white guy
asked.
“Home,” Eddie had said, grabbing for his
sister’s hand and banking around the two. “My dad runs the cemetery.”
The Hispanic guy moved in front of them
and Eddie stopped short, pulling his sister to him.
“Move it, jerkoff,” Eddie said coolly in
a way only invincible thirteen year-old boys can.
Eddie got a lot of crap later by less-understanding sorts who thought they
may have walked away unscathed had he not said that; the State Police
seemed convinced what then happened would have anyway. The Hispanic
backhanded Eddie with such force that Eddie landed several feet away, the
force of his head on the flat grave marker enough to shatter his skull on
impact. Temporary paralysis, the result of the incredible trauma, hit him
immediately. All he could do, conscious as a coffee-drinker on caffeine
overdrive, was lie there and watch through blood-soaked eyes.
The white guy had his hands on Kimberly
before Eddie had finished landing. She screamed then, loud and shrill as
little girls do, but the nearby sound of a riding mower over the hill
drowned out any hope of anyone hearing her. The white guy picked her up as
she wailed, flipped her high over his head and mercilessly bodyslammed her
to the grass. Her scream, only briefly interrupted by the impact as the
first rack of ribs broke, rekindled after a moment, although weakly.
He picked her up again, slammed her back
to the ground. Again she wailed, ever so weakly then. The third attempt
saw him getting smarter as he hurled her headfirst into one of those flat
grave markers.
Eddie, unable to move, tried to gurgle at
that point, but the Hispanic kicked him so hard his stomach ruptured and
one kidney was rendered forever useless. Only eight solid hours of
emergency surgery would patch the stomach, remove the destroyed kidney,
and repair the vicious damage to the boy’s skull.
Kimberly was done screaming then, only
crying and whimpering well under the roar of the mower nearby. She was
unable to move, mostly from nearly every rib being shattered, her
collarbone in a dozen pieces, and her hips smashed, but also from the
runaway hemorrhaging going on all over her insides.
That done, the white guy got down between
the dying little girl’s legs, pushing her dress aside and his own pants
open, and proceeded to rape her seven-year-old body. He and the Hispanic
guy took turns. Eddie, unable to move, had no choice to watch it all
happening only six feet away, and reported that they each had their way
with her twice right there on the grave. She tried meekly to fight, but
they were but the movements of a mechanical doll with a drained battery.
By the time the Hispanic guy had finished with his second romp, she was no
longer moving. The police figured at that point the Hispanic was a
practicing necrophiliac.
If she had lived, she would never have been able to bear children. Far too
much damage had occurred to her insides. Screwing her tiny uterus had
ripped it up as well; her Fallopian tubes were shredded, her ovaries
crushed like raw eggs.
Eddie was trapped in the dimmest tunnel
vision when it was all over, barely able to see them checking her for a
pulse. They had apparently assumed Eddie was already dead and, as if
suddenly realizing the depth of their situation, hurriedly tucked in their
bloodied sex organs and, high-fiving each other in celebrating their
mastery of “the little bitch,” got the hell out of Dodge.
Two minutes later, the big mower topped
the rise and Jack Meader saw the bloodied, beaten forms of his children
lying on graves.
* *
*
The explosion that came next was that of
atomic proportions. The state was in an uproar. National news picked up
the story. A manhunt was immediately launched and every law enforcement
officer in New England was on the alert. Eddie was able to speak the next
day and gave descriptions – he even remembered that the men had referred
to each other by name – “Smitch” was the white guy and “Dace” the
Hispanic. He also picked out some words in Spanish spoken by Dace that
made sense to him, having been studying elementary Spanish in his seventh
grade class: “cerezas moradas,” which he clearly identified and was sure
it meant “blueberries.”
The manhunt took on some direction then.
Nearly all of the world’s blueberries are harvested from Maine, and the
migrant workers knew it. Blueberry season in the state showed countless
transients flocking in to make money raking them, and apparently Smitch
and Dace were two of them. Hordes of State and County police swarmed like
angry bees to the blueberry fields of Maine -- primarily the Downeast area
towards the eastern border near Canada. Before the end of the day,
tentative identities had been established: Jesse Mitchell, native to
Worcester, Massachusetts; and Jorge Desiervo, from New York City. The two
had been raking on Jim Barker’s land until three days before Kimberly and
Eddie had been attacked. Barker had fired them for sexually threatening
several female rakers.
The people of Maine wanted blood. The
duo’s pictures had been steadily shown on television and in the
newspapers. A quick piss stop at a rest area in Kennebunkport while on
Interstate 95 in a stolen Toyota Corolla was their undoing.
An off-duty South Portland homicide
detective who wandered in to the restroom recognized the two as they stood
on either side of him at the urinals. The cop calmly finished his leak,
zipped up, stepped back from the pisser, drew his nine millimeter, and
hollered them to the floor – exposed penises, still covered in dried
blood, notwithstanding.
Justice went quickly. A truckload of
expert witnesses jumped in to confirm the DNA evidence. Eddie Meader, of
course, was the most damning testimony of them all, the eyewitness to the
events.
Jack was barely been able to attend the
court proceedings. His composure was well in check until Eddie jumped up
on the witness stand, face a spiderweb of lifetime scars, and began
hollering at the defendants, “Why did you do it?! Why did you do that to
my sister?!”
The judge let him go for a minute, let
him yell and cry and swear. Francis Morton had been a judge for thirty-two
years, a lawyer twenty before that, and he had seen cases innumerable and
had defended the American legal system and ‘innocent until proven guilty’
as any good judge should. But the case had already been decided; he knew
it as well as anyone. The perps would be found guilty and spend the rest
of their lives looking at concrete. With any luck, a few other residents
of Tommy-Town would give them a taste of their own medicine, beat them and
rape them senseless. If the Fates were in particularly good form that day,
maybe worse.
So Morton let the boy say his piece, all
the while watching the members of the jury, their faces flushing deeper as
the moments passed, Eddie crying and demanding answers from the smug
accused who, to this point, had steadfastly maintained their innocence.
Finally, he rapped the gavel, called for order, let everyone know this was
a courtroom and not a circus, et cetera, those things television courtroom
dramas told us judges were supposed to do.
Things would have moved on quietly then, as Eddie reseated wiped his tears
away, when Jesse Mitchell suddenly answered the boy’s wailed question from
the defense table, his voice shattering the frozen silence like a Coast
Guard icebreaker tearing up the Penobscot River: “Cuz she wuz young an’ sweet an’ the tightest fuckin’ virgin I ever stuck my cock in, ya little bastid.”
In the wink of an eye, Jack Meader lost
his mind.
He screamed, leaping from his seat, and
vaulting over the partition. Bailiffs scrambled in but not before Jack
wrapped his fingers around Jesse’s throat and drew blood. The whole thing
lasted maybe a half-minute before Jack was pulled off the perp and
dragged, kicking and screaming, from the courtroom.
Judge Morton hadn’t moved a muscle during
the entire event, a point not even mentioned by the media but certainly
noticed by all. When Jack was gone, the judge asked Mitchell if he wanted
to change his plea to guilty. Mitchell refused with a smile, saying he
hadn’t killed anyone and just wanted to piss everyone off. The judge
informed him he had succeeded. The trial ended that day and the jury
deliberated for five whole minutes before convicting both monsters on
every single charge with which they had been hit.
Citizens screamed for Maine to adopt the
death penalty. Public outcry rippled throughout New England and the rest
of the country watched at the atrocity came to a justified close, but the
long and short of it was that in all the horror of the entire ordeal, when
it was over it was over. The monsters headed to Thomaston State Prison and
the Meaders went home to continue their lives raising Patrick and a
traumatized Eddie, and to do so without a bubbly little girl who was
prettier than a pink bow on an Easter dress.
All through it, Jack and Judy suffered a
grief that only they could understand – that only such parents could
understand. Counseling began with no plan for it to end in the far future.
Eddie barely went a night when he didn’t awaken screaming and crying like
some three and half year old child who had just dreamed the first
nightmare about slavering, two-mouthed monsters.
Judy was better able to deal with the
loss and move on with some relative normalcy. Jack, on the other hand,
faired not nearly so well as his wife.
From the moment he had ridden the mower
over the rise, navigating the bulky beast between the D’AMATO and
SPEKHARDT family plots, and saw the bloody horror before him, his life had
irrevocably changed. While he was at least thankful that Eddie had
survived, the loss of Kimberly Dawn wasn’t something he could begin to
handle.
Everyone consoled him with such senseless
truths like It would have at least been easier if she had died in some
normal fashion, but Jack just couldn’t understand that logic. Eaten away
by billions of ravenous cancer cells, rendered immune to the tiniest
illness by AIDS, body crushed by a speeding tractor trailer, burned to the
bones in a house fire, decapitated by a runaway airplane propeller – they
would all have been impossible from which to recover. That she had died
the way she had was far more traumatic than many other forms of death, but
the solid fact was that Jack Meader no longer had his Kimberly Dawn, no
longer had the one living creature in the world who had loved him
unconditionally: who had worshipped the air he breathed, the ground he
walked on, the life force that made him Jack Meader.
“I promised her all her life I would
always be there for her,” he would sob to the psychiatrists during
therapy. “I promised her I would always protect her, always hold her. I
was RIGHT THERE over that rise, mowing my damn lawns, RIGHT THERE and I
wasn’t THERE to save her.”
They told him it wasn’t his fault, that
Mitchell and Desiervo had done the deed and they were at fault. In fact,
they told him, if he hadn’t been in that section of the cemetery at all,
Eddie, too, would have died. Without Eddie, the perps might never have
been found. But Jack couldn’t see it. It wasn’t Eddie he had sworn to for
seven years that he would always be there, to hold and keep safe.
* *
*
#
Jack lived immersed in his swamp of grief for a full year after the
incident. All the while, he was caretaker of Faith Hill Cemetery, mowing
lawns and pruning trees and righting gravestones toppled by pubescent
vandals with nothing better to do on their late school nights. He refused
to go back to that section of the cemetery where his son had been
bludgeoned nearly to death and his daughter beaten and raped until her
little body gave up. Al always took care of that part.
The one thing Jack did every single day
in that cemetery, without missing it once, was to visit Kimberly Dawn’s
grave. The visits usually lasted anywhere from a half an hour to an hour,
rain or shine, humid Maine summers or blisteringly cold Maine winters.
Even through the Great Ice Storm of 1998, the longest-running ice storm in
any Mainer’s memory, he was there, trudging across the vicious arctic
wilderness that was somehow Faith Hill Cemetery. There had been so much
ice that every stone was encased in layers upon layers of frozen snow and
clear, glassy ice. Nothing looked familiar, but Jack knew exactly where
his daughter’s grave was – and was there every day during that frozen
apocalypse, chiseling the frosty armor from her headstone and digging
rock-hard snow and ice from her lot. He knew he’d never abandon her again,
no matter what.
* *
*
It happened on the first year anniversary
of Kimberly’s murder. It was going on midnight as Judy killed the
television and the light and cuddled up to her husband in their bed. All
was silent but the ticking of the alarm clock, and then Jack broke the
silence.
“It’s been a year today,” he said softly.
Judy hugged him close to her. “I know,
honey. I know.”
Another long pause, and then, “I just
wasn’t there for her. What could she be thinking, wherever she is now?”
“Oh, Jack,” Judy said, her voice wavering
as she gripped her arms and legs about him in the darkness. “Honey, she’s
thinking how wonderful a daddy you were, how you would have done anything
to have changed that day. And she’s not thinking about blaming you. Not
one little bit.”
“I think she’s disappointed,” he said to
his wife, and maybe to the night as well.
“She could never be,” Judy soothed.
“She was seven,” he said, his voice
remarkably calm for the discussion they were having. “A seven year-old
can’t understand. A seven year-old can only see that her daddy promised
and promised all of his miserable life and it was nothing but lies. Seven
year-olds can’t see mistakes and random things.”
“She can see your powerful love,” Judy
tried, but she knew she was losing.
He said quietly, “I’d give anything to
make it up to her.”
Judy said no more. It would have done no
good, and she knew it. She drifted off to sleep.
* *
*
She was awakened suddenly a short while
later by Jack shaking her. She came awake with a start and sat up. He was
up, sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning over her, hand on her
shoulder. “Jack, what is it?”
“Do you hear?” he said excitedly.
“Listen!”
She listened, strained to hear whatever
it was he was hearing. The distant sounds of trucks on Route 2 nearby were
all she could find. “I don’t know what—”
“Ssshh!” he said harshly. “Listen close.
You’ll hear her. Kimberly.”
Judy lost her breath for a second, and
then sighed. “Honey, it was a dream. Lie back down—”
“No!” He sounded angry that she should
even think to question him in that way. “It’s Kimberly, up on the hill.
She’s calling to me. ‘Daddy, daddy,’ she keeps calling to me.”
“That just isn’t true,” Judy said. “She’s
been gone for a year, Jack.”
“Up on that hill, she’s buried.”
“Christ, Jack!” Judy exploded then. “How
long are you going to do this? How long? Kimberly is dead! DEAD!”
He looked at her through the dimness,
shocked. “Of course she is. I know that. I do. But she’s up there now,
calling to me. You be real quiet, and you’ll hear.”
She exhaled abruptly, turning from him
and flopping back into bed, hauling the covers up over her shoulders.
“I’ve had it with all of this! You think this doesn’t hurt me, too? You
think I don’t feel terrible about what happened? That sometimes I just
feel like dying because I can’t change things? I do! But I can’t change
things! I accept that!”
He was still sitting on the edge of the
bed, intently listening for noises out the open window. Not listening to
her. She let it go, laid back down. A year of counseling hadn’t changed
things; an argument at midnight wouldn’t, either.
The she heard what he was hearing.
Far-off, but not too far, a tiny voice: Daaaaddyyyy....
Judy felt the hair stand up on her neck, her back, fluffing on her arms.
“You hear that?” he whispered excitedly.
Daaaaddyyy...
“My little girl,” Jack said simply. “She
wants me.”
“Dammit,” she cursed. “Oh, dammit, Jack,
it’s a kid but it’s not our daughter! Some scared kid, too young to be out
past her bedtime, in the cemetery and lost, and she wants her daddy.
That’s it!”
Perhaps he considered it for a moment,
because then he said, “Well, as caretaker, I’d better get out there and
help her home. Cemetery’s no place to be lost at night.”
She could find no way to argue that. He
got up and began pulling on his pants.
* *
*
Jack made his way across the graveyard
under a crescent moon. He needed no flashlight, as he knew the cemetery
like the back of his hand, and there was pretty much enough moonlight to
see by. He threaded his way amongst the tombstones that stood across the
hilly landscape like companies of troops. He knew exactly where he was
heading, and could get there blind if he had to.
He topped the rise on the little hill
beyond which was their new family plot, where Kimberly had been the first
to become a tenant. He focused his eyes on the dark shape he knew to be
her headstone not a hundred feet away, pausing a moment in wonder.
The headstone moved. He was sure of it.
He stood, awed, frightened, full of
sorrow, watching the shadows as they morphed from one blackness to
another. He blinked, tried to focus better.
Daaaddyy...
He sucked in his breath. The shadows were
moving disjointedly, swaying next to the gravestone, almost as if
something were growing there, bursting forth from the ground like a plant
fighting its way up in search of sunlight.
Jack staggered forward, clumsily, down
the slight grade toward whatever was happening. Somebody was dancing on
his daughter’s grave, maybe – well, not for long.
He closed the distance by half before
whomever it was spoke again: Daddy... Daddy...
He froze, started, froze again.
Daddy... why weren’t you there for me?
He shuddered, blinked. The shadows were
swaying above the grass, wrenching to and fro like someone buried in beach
sand up to his waist and trying to get out. Jack stumbled once more
forward. “Kimberly?” he croaked.
The shadows suddenly stiffened, as if
someone were standing straight up, and as suddenly as they were moving
they were gone completely.
Jack broke into a lumbering run, tearing
across the grass and reaching the site, collapsing to his knees and
sliding on the damp grass. His skidded painfully across rough, grassless
terrain before he reached the stone. His eyes adjusted to the light. He
leaned over and felt the ground. Dirt, as if turned over with a spade.
Clumps of sod pushed aside. He began to cry.
“Come back, baby,” he wailed in low tones, echoing across the moonlit
graveyard like the desperate chant of a shunned lover. “Come back to
Daddy. Come here...”
* *
*
Judy Meader shivered as she heard the
phantom voice of her husband carrying mournfully across the cemetery, Come
back, Kimmy... Daddy’s here... I’m sorry, baby... come back to me... come
back...
* *
* * * * * *
*
Jack's madness has only just begun. So
has Judy's...
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