The Damned Read Free

windows on the forty-second floor overlooked the Detroit River, so high up he could look across to Canada and the flat tobacco fields beyond. In the year before Ash died, he spent a couple nights a week sleeping on the sofa there. Hiding.
    Our mother was a self-described homemaker, but in reality she was an earplugged sleep-inner, a noontime sherry drinker, a Chardonnay zombie by the time we came in the door from school. Sometimes I’d find her passed out in a flower bed with gardener’s gloves still on, keeping their grip on pruning shears and trickling hose. Once, I discovered her in the tub, the water cold. She was still alive, though barely so. Her naked body surprisingly heavy as I attempted the impossible: heaving her out while trying not to touch her at the same time. We both ended up in a pile on the bathmat.
    â€œThank you, Danny,” she said when she could find the words, using the walls for balance as she tried to bring some dignity to the walk back to her room. “That was gentlemanly of you.”
    She died there, in that same bathroom, two years before Ash did. A “domestic accident,” which is what they call falling asleep drunk and drowning in the tub, so that you don’t have to use a different word for it. Dad found her after coming home late from work, his wife’s eyes looking through him from six inches under the surface.
    It wasn’t the usual suburban strain of depression that plagued her, but a terror she did what she could to quiet. A knowledge of what lies on the other side, waiting for us to call out to it, open a door for it to pass through.
    And guilt, too, I think. The regret of being the one to bring Ash into the world.
    W HAT SORT OF THINGS DID Ash do? Why was she a girl whose own mother might wish was never born?
    Let me tell you a story. A short, terrible little story.
    In the winter when Ash and I were twelve, there was a day of sun that followed a cold snap, a melting of snow that left slicked streets and dripping eaves. The very next morning, the cold returned. Sidewalks and driveways turned to ice rinks. And hanging from every roof, icicles as long and sharp as spears.
    â€œMonster teeth,” Ash said when she saw them.
    When we got home from school that day, the icicles were still there, though the forecast called for higher temperatures later in the week.
    â€œWe need to save one,” Ash said. “They’re too pretty to just die .”
    She made me get a stepladder. When I returned, she directed me to the icicle she’d chosen, and that I had to climb to the ladder’s top to pull away.
    â€œBe careful !” Ash said, a real concern for the ice that I’d never heard her genuinely express for another human being before.
    When I handed it over to her she cradled it like a baby as she carried it to the garage and hid it under a bag of pork chops at the bottom of the freezer chest.
    Months passed. At some point in the spring we both watched a TV show, a police procedural where the killer used ice bullets to shoot his victim through the skull. Only a trace of water was found in the pool of blood left on the floor, puzzling the detectives. “Ice! Completely undetectable!” the prosecutor declared during the trial.
    That night Ash repeated the line, like a song lyric, on her way up to bed.
    From the day I pulled it down for her she never mentioned the icicle, and neither did I. There wasn’t one of those days when I didn’t think about it, though. Imagining the electrocuting pain of it driven into the back of my neck as I slept. Waiting to open my eyes in the night and find her standing over me, the icicle held in both hands like a stake, her face set in the blank mask she wore when she wasn’t acting and was her perfectly hollow self.
    Summer came. Long, unstructured days of waiting for something to happen.
    And then it did.
    I went out into the yard to look for something in the garage and found the dog instead.