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Donna took early retirement, and in 2010 we became a one-house couple: mine, in Newburyport. It was her decision. At first I thought it was because she wanted more together time, and I was right about that. Just not why she felt more together time had become necessary. We spent a week getting her settled, then she asked one sunshiny October Saturday if I’d walk with her by the rock wall that divides my property from the Merrimack River. We held hands and kicked through the leaves, listening to the crackle and smelling that sweet cinnamon odor they get before they go limp and start to decay. It was a beautiful afternoon with big fat clouds sailing across a blue sky. I said it looked like she had lost weight. She said that was true. She said it was because she had cancer.
I was afraid that thinking about the buzzards tearing into Allie would keep me awake, so I went poking through Greg’s double-sized medicine cabinet (always a bit of a hypochondriac, my friend) and found an Ambien prescription with four left in the bottle. According to the label, this particular helping of sleep medicine had expired in May of 2018, but I thought what the hell and took a couple. Maybe they worked, maybe it was just the placebo effect, but I slept all night, and with no dreams.
I woke refreshed at seven the next morning and decided to make my regular walk, feeling I couldn’t avoid the spot where Allie died for the rest of my stay. I put on shorts and sneakers and went downstairs to start the Keurig. Greg’s driveway opens into a large courtyard on the side of the house. A window at the foot of the stairs looks out on this courtyard. I got two steps from the bottom of the stairs and froze, staring.
The stroller was out there.
I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t quite take it in. I felt it had to be a trick of the shadows, only in that early morning light there were no shadows… except, that is, for the one thrown by the stroller. It was there. It was real. More than the object itself, the shadow proved it. Shadows don’t exist unless there’s something to make them.
After my initial brain-freeze, I was afraid. Someone, some mean person, had come here and left that stroller to freak me out. It worked. I was freaked out. I couldn’t think who would have done such a thing, certainly not Officers Zane or Canavan. Mr. Ito had probably heard of Mrs. Bell’s death—news travels fast in small communities—but he wasn’t the practical joker type, and his son spent most of the time in Internet dreamland. There were no usual suspects, and in a way that didn’t matter. What mattered was that someone had come to my house in what the pulp novelists call the dead of night.
Had I locked up? In my initial shock and fright (at first I wasn’t even angry), I couldn’t remember. I’m not sure I could have remembered my late wife’s middle name just then, had I been asked. I rushed to the front door: locked. I went to the one that gave on the pool and the patio: locked. I went to the back door, which opens into the garage, and that one was locked, too. So at least no one had actually been inside, doing a midnight creep. It should have been a relief but it wasn’t.
One of the cops must have left that thing, I thought. Zane locked the garage and took the keys.
There was logic there, but I just didn’t believe it. Zane had seemed solid, dependable, far from dumb. Also, was a key to the garage really necessary? Probably not. The lock on the side door looked like the kind you could pop with a coathanger or credit card.
I went out to look at the stroller. I thought there might be a note of the sort that would be left behind in a creepy Grade C suspense movie: You’re next and Go back where you came from both came to mind.
There was no note. There was something worse. Yellow shorts on one seat, red shorts on the other. Not the same ones as yesterday. And shirts draped across the backs, also not the same. I didn’t want to touch those shirts and didn’t have to in order to read what was on them: TWEEDLEDUM and TWEEDLEDEE. Twin shirts for sure, but the twins who had worn these were long dead.
What to do with the goddam stroller was the question, and a good one. Now that the reality of it being there was setting in, my first shock, closely followed by fear, was being replaced by curiosity and anger: what a shit way to start the morning. I had my cell phone in the pocket of my shorts. I called the County Sheriff’s Department and asked for Officer P. Zane. The receptionist put me on hold, then came back and said Officer Zane was off-duty until the following Monday. I knew better than to ask for a cop’s personal number, so instead asked the dispatcher to please tell him Victor Trenton had called, and would he please call back?
“I’ll see what I can do,” the woman said, a non-response that did nothing to ameliorate my shitty morning.
“You do that,” I said, and ended the call.
Mr. Ito would also not be in until the following Monday, and I wasn’t expecting any other company, but I had no intention of letting that stroller sit in the courtyard. I decided to push it back to Mrs. Bell’s and return it to the garage. It was on my usual walk, after all, and I might be able to tell if some practical joker/mean person had forced the garage door. First, though, I took a couple of photos of the perambulator in situ, to show Zane. Assuming he was interested, that was. He might be less than happy that I’d moved the stroller from the courtyard where I found it, but was it evidence of a crime? Had Allie Bell been beaten to death with a perambulator, perforce? No. I was just returning it to where we’d put it.
I pushed it up the road under the simmering morning sun. Maybe the residual effects of the Ambien were still in my system, because once the fear had been dispelled by the pram’s prosaic ordinariness (even the shorts and shirts were prosaic, the sort of clothing available in any Walmart or Amazon), I fell into a kind of daze. I suppose if I’d been in bed, or even lying on the sofa, I would have drifted off into sleep. But because I was walking on Rattlesnake Road, I just let my mind float on its own current.
Squeaky wheel or no squeaky wheel (I really should oil it, I thought), the stroller was easy to push, especially without any four-year-old boys to weigh it down. I did it with my left hand. With my right I touched the shirts hanging over the backs of the seats—first one, then the other. I didn’t realize what I was doing until later.
I thought of the boys crossing the road and then fighting their way toward the beach through the undergrowth. Not angry about it, not using their little-boy cusswords if they got whapped in the face by a backswinging frond or when a jutting branch scraped an arm. Not angry, not impatient, not wishing they’d taken the boardwalk. They were deep in a shared fantasy—jungle explorers wearing newspaper hats their father had made them out of the Tribune’s Sunday color funnies. Somewhere ahead there might be a treasure chest left behind by pirates, or a gigantic ape like King Kong, a movie they had seen on Tampa Matinee at four o’clock, sitting crosslegged before the TV until their mom commandeered it for the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.
They hear the rattling, low at first but getting louder and closer as they push heroically onward. At first they ignore it, then make the fatal mistake of dismissing it. Joe thinks it might be bees and they could find honey. Jake asks him how many times his brother would like to get stung and tells him not to be stupid. They are after treasure. Honey is not treasure. The rattling sound is coming from the left and the right. No problem! The way to the beach is straight ahead. They can already hear the waves and they will paddle their feet before digging in the sand for gold (and building a castle if the treasure hunt yields no results). They want to wade in the water because it’s hot, a hot day like the one my little boy had to deal with. He had no water in which to paddle his feet, he was trapped in a hot car with his mommy because there was a monster outside. The monster wouldn’t leave and the car wouldn’t go.
They don’t see the dip because it’s masked by a tangle of bushes. Those bushes also hide a den of snakes—a rhumba of rattlers—that lives in its shade. Jake and Joe, side by side, could go around this overgrown clump of greenery, but that’s not how brave explorers roll. Brave explorers go straight ahead, hacking away the greenery with invisible machetes.
That’s what they do, and because they’re walking side by side, they plunge into the dip together. And into the snakes. There are dozens of them. Some are still young—snakelets—and although they can bite, they cannot (contrary to popular belief) inject poison. But their bites are still painful, and most of the rattlers are adults in full protection mode. They shoot their diamond-shaped heads forward and sink their fangs deep.
The boys cry out—ow and don’t and what and that hurts.
They are bitten multiple times on the ankles and calves. Joe goes to one knee. A snake strikes his thigh and wraps its body around his knee like a tourniquet. Jake struggles out of the brush-filled dip wearing snakes like ankle bracelets. That rattling sound fills the world. He tries to pull Joe to his feet and a snake sinks its fangs into the meat of his small palm as quick as winking. Joe is on his belly now, with snakes crawling all over him. He tries to protect his face, at least, and can’t. He’s bitten on his neck and cheeks, and when he turns his head in a futile effort to get away, on his nose and mouth. His face begins to swell.
Jake turns and begins to blunder back to the road and the Bell house on the other side, still wearing snakes around his ankles. One falls off. The other begins to twine its way up toward the leg of the boy’s shorts, a rattlesnake barber pole. Why does he run, when the two of them have always done everything together? Is it because he knows his twin brother is already beyond help? No. Because he’s in a blind panic? No—not even blind panic could cause him to abandon Joe. It’s because he wants to get Daddy if he’s still home, Mommy if Daddy isn’t. It’s not panic, it’s a rescue mission. Jake pulls the snake off his leg and has a moment to see its beady assessing eyes before it buries its fangs in his wrist. He flings it away and tries to run but he can’t run, the poison is coursing through him now, making his heart beat erratically, making it hard to breathe.
Joe is no longer screaming.
Jake’s vision doubles, then triples. He can no longer even walk, so he tries to crawl. His hands are swelling up like cartoon gloves. He tries to say his brother’s name and can’t because his throat—
What brought me out of this vision was the clack and whine of the swing gate going up. The stroller I was pushing had broken the photoelectric beam that operates it. In my zombie state I’d walked far past Allie’s driveway. I saw my right hand was still going back and forth, touching first one shirt (TWEEDLEDEE) and then the other (TWEEDLEDUM). I pulled it back as if it were touching something hot. The day was still relatively cool, but my face was wet with sweat and my tee-shirt was dark with it. I had only been walking (at least I thought so; couldn’t remember for sure), but I was breathing fast, as if at the end of a two-hundred-yard dash.
I pulled the stroller back and the swing gate went down. I asked myself what had just happened, but thought I knew. The other members of my team at the agency would have laughed—except maybe for Cathy Wilkin, who had an imagination that stretched further than taglines for toilet bowl cleaner—but I had no other way to explain it. I had seen movies and at least one TV documentary where so-called clairvoyants were called in by the police to help locate the bodies of people who were presumed dead. As bloodhounds are given an article of clothing to get the scent they’re supposed to follow, the psychics were given articles that were deemed important to the person they were supposed to locate. Mostly the results had been bullshit, but in a few cases it had worked. Or seemed to.
It was the shirts. Touching the shirts. And the part about Tad? Those were my own memories intruding on whatever vibe I’d been getting from those shirts. My son finding his way into my strange state of seeing wasn’t surprising. He had died at about the same age as the Bell twins, and at close to the same time. Triplets instead of twins. Tragedy calling to tragedy.
As I turned the stroller and started back, the vividness of my vision started to fade. I began to question the idea that I’d had an authentic psychic experience. It wasn’t as though I didn’t know what happened to the Bell twins, after all; maybe my mind had just added some details, like the concealed dip they’d fallen into. It might not have happened that way at all. Plus, there was no denying that I’d been in an extremely suggestible state because of the pram showing up as it had.
