Chapter Five
The cellar below was full of cobwebs. A door off the kitchen pantry led down a narrow set of stairs to the dim, dank concrete
room with a low ceiling. There, Helen stored the food she’d jarred herself as well as the cans she’d bought at the store.
She also kept secrets down there.
When Helen had awoken that morning, it hadn’t been her intention to hold a séance. Her intention had been to get her chores
done. Though she didn’t think of the things she did in the cellar as séances. She simply thought of it as talking to Tyler.
As Helen reached for the can of beans, her eyes drifted to the box tucked away on the lowest shelf. It was concealed behind
her stack of how-to books—how to garden, how to can food, how to sew—all guides that she’d read hopefully at first, then half-heartedly,
then begrudgingly, and now she was ready to throw the whole sorry bunch in the pond.
Candles peeked out from the top of the hidden box, and she felt the tug on her soul. She told herself that if she could get
the stew simmering quickly enough, she would return and try.
But five minutes later, the can of beans was abandoned on the floor and burning candles were carefully arranged around her favorite photograph of Tyler.
She had taken it herself when they had been at the ocean together.
His sandy-colored hair lifted in the wind at a weird angle, but that sudden gust had made him forget himself for a second.
Normally he would get camera-shy, but that time she’d managed to catch the playful glint in his blue eyes, the sparkle he often had when he looked at her.
In that moment, Tyler wasn’t posing dutifully, like he usually did for her.
No, he was just a man looking at her the way he always did, and she’d encapsulated it forever.
Helen stared down at Tyler’s face, the candlelight playing across the photo, then she closed her eyes, still holding its image
in her mind.
“Tyler,” she said. “I just wanted to try again. I still think of you every day, every minute. Maybe you know that. I hope
so.” She felt the pressure building behind her eyes. “I hear your name in my head. It’s caught in my throat, and it sits under
my tongue, and it repeats inside me. All day long.”
In the beginning, his name in her head was like the ticking of a metronome. Tyler, Tyler, Tyler. Sometimes comforting, sometimes maddening. When it was the latter, she’d drive out the pounding of his name by holding the
poetry lines there instead. Now she was so used to it that it felt almost like a second heartbeat.
Helen took a deep breath. “I’m trying, I am. I’m trying to be a good wife to Wade. I made this choice. I chose this road.
I’ve made mistakes. I’m not perfect, I know that. You know that. It’s hard, though. I just . . .”
She was having a difficult time finding the words this time. “Do you remember the story you told me about the sailors who
floated at sea?” Her voice cracked. Of course he remembered. The story had been a true one, a news piece from the 1980s. Three
sailors had been lost at sea, their boat capsized. They’d survived for days by doing the dead man’s float. They’d waited it
out, face down in the water, arms spread wide, bobbing up for breath every so often.
Helen was doing the dead man’s float every day.
Initially she’d thought Wade was the rescue boat coming to pluck her from the sea, but she knew now that wasn’t the case.
She was still floating, her face in waters that were darkening again the more days she spent out here with Wade.
She didn’t need to explain that to Tyler, though. He knew.
Tears slipped out of her closed eyes as she whispered, “I think the coyotes are coming for me.” That was why they howled:
to let her know she was next. Ridiculous, she knew. What a ridiculous thought, but she’d always been able to say ridiculous
things out loud to Tyler. He’d always gently cradled her darkest thoughts.
Tyler, Tyler, Tyler.
Helen opened her eyes and wiped her face. “Tyler? I need to know you’re okay. I still need a sign, something from you. I still
can’t figure any of this out. Why you’re gone and I’m here. None of it makes sense to me.”
She sat and waited. She waited for a long time that day in the cellar. Silence extended its icy fingers until, finally, she
was shivering with it. Deep in her bones, she knew it was time for Tyler to reach out. She felt convinced it was possible,
and then she felt angry he hadn’t found a way to do it yet.
“Tyler?” Nothing. Just the solitude. “Tyler?!”
Abruptly, Helen stood.
Upstairs, she opened the small wooden box on the mantel and pulled out the gun.
She wavered in front of the burning fireplace, staring down at the gun, as her tears fell onto the barrel. She stood there
long enough in front of the fire that sweat broke on her brow and dripped down, and the blood began to seep through the bandage
on her index finger. Her tears, her sweat, her blood, her pain—it was all pouring out of her, pouring onto the gun, pouring
into her need to reach Tyler, until that need propelled her back into action.
Her feet pounded down the cellar stairs.
In front of the shrine, Helen shouted, “You want me to come to you, Tyler?” She cocked the gun and raised it to her temple. “I will!”
She closed her eyes, and her breathing quickened. She wasn’t sure if she believed in a monolithic God, but she believed the
universe couldn’t just be random bacteria and a fireball that exploded. She believed Tyler’s soul was somewhere and she wanted
to be with it, and if there was some type of God that so many churches preached about, she didn’t think He was a cruel one
who sent suffering people to hell just because they couldn’t handle the pain of this physical realm.
She was going to do it, she was.
In mere seconds, there would be relief. It would be final.
She didn’t think of her parents in that moment, but it wasn’t because she was selfish. It was because she had spent almost
two endless years feeling like an open wound, and the sorrow had blocked out the memories of times she’d laughed with them
or shared interesting conversations. What she felt radiating from her parents these days on their infrequent phone calls was
something close to pity, and she assumed her darkness made them feel darker. Her light had been long gone, and now she just
made everything worse for everyone.
Helen didn’t think of Tyler’s family either. They kept in touch through her PO Box in town, cards arriving on holidays and
letters at random intervals. The sentences were always full of friendliness, but she felt the deep sorrow in every word. They
were only doing it out of a sense of duty.
None of her old friends flashed in her mind either. She hadn’t seen them in so long that it seemed like a different woman
in a different life had maintained those friendships. The woman she was, here and now, had no real friends.
Somehow, she didn’t even consider Wade. The truth was, she simply forgot about him.
Later, it would be impossible for her to say how it didn’t occur to her that Wade would have been the one to find her body in the cellar.
It would have been devastating for him. She would have inflicted the worst kind of trauma upon someone she cared for.
No, it wasn’t the living ones who stopped her from pulling the trigger.
It was the notion in her head that maybe pulling the trigger would disappoint Tyler. And when she had that thought, she couldn’t
go through with it, and she lowered the gun.
But stopping filled her with a tempest of anger.
She ran back up the stairs and raced outside into the gathering wind, and she screamed Tyler’s name as loud as she could.
She wasn’t calling out to him for help anymore though. She was trying to crack open the universe.
Helen pointed the gun at the sky and fired.
The sound and the recoil jolted her, but it was the first thing that day that felt almost good.
She aimed high again and fired another bullet. If Tyler was her guardian angel, maybe one of her bullets would go whizzing
past him. Wake him up and make him think twice about not giving her a direct sign.
Helen felt an ominous vibration in the air, unlike anything she’d ever felt, like thunder so far away she couldn’t hear it
but could somehow still sense it.
Later, she’d look back and realize it wasn’t thunder.
It was a warning.
It was her last chance to close the door she was forcing open.
She pointed the gun at the sky again. If she couldn’t have Tyler, she wanted to break apart the sky and bleed this realm into
the next.
She fired the gun a third time and almost instantly heard a strange sound—was it an impact? A scream? Or were those things
in her head? She didn’t know exactly what she’d heard, but she knew something terrible had happened with the third shot.
Helen was well read, so she was aware that fateful things often happen according to the rule of three.
In mythology, the Cosmos is divided into three equal parts: the Sky, the Sea, and the Underworld.
In the Bible, there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
In supernatural parlor games, you peer into a mirror in a blackened room and say Bloody Mary exactly three times. It’s always three.
So in a way, she wasn’t surprised that it was her third gunshot that sent something hurtling toward earth. In a way, she was
hoping, expecting, demanding. She didn’t realize what it was at first, but she saw the motion of it fall from the sky.
Instinctively, she ducked.