“Look,” I said.
Still, I hadn’t really saved her. Del would suffer because of what we had done—David and me. The dog renewed its barking, on and on that night, and for several days after. Sometimes, it would appear to whine at the screen door, and once it chased me down the pebbled drive, and the sound of its chuffing breath, the pebbles kicked up by its paws, terrified me. The next day, I saw Cindy Berger. At first, I thought she was one of the summer people who sometimes cut through the yard to avoid the rocky bulkhead. I even called out to her, “Hello,” foolishly, and started across the lawn toward her. But she stood completely still and luminous by the privet hedge to the pool. She disappeared just as I recognized her dress as the one they buried her in—a satin halter dress she wore to the eighth-grade dance, her last school function before the leukemia killed her.
I knew nothing would ever be the same.
28
At the top of the grand staircase in the old Buffalo State Hospital, my warm breath condensed in the cold. The dead waited in the corridor’s shadows—pale arms and feet and glowing white gowns. They’d come finally, as witnesses. Del arrived at the top of the stairs, her blond hair incandescent in the darkness. I couldn’t quite make out her face. Sleet slashed at the big windows, but there was no sound from below.
She held William’s Leica. The camera’s body was dented, the lens cracked. Its back swung away and the film was revealed. She shut the back and held the camera closed.
“It was at the bottom, beside him,” she said, her voice small.
“Is he—?” I said.
William’s bag sat on the floor behind me, and Del dug through it and found his flashlight. She located his wallet, his cell phone, his keys, and then stuffed them along with the camera back inside. The darkness seemed to tighten in on us where we squatted over the bag.
“We have to call for help,” I said. I knew this was what needed to be done, but I let myself breathe, slowly in and out, and I told myself he would have thrown me down the staircase. I felt amid the rush of emotions a sense of relief at having been saved, and then a terrible wave of guilt.
Del gave me a hard look and shouldered the camera bag. “Get up,” she said. “We have to leave.”
Behind the flashlight’s trembling beam we started down the long, curving stairway. As the light neared the bottom, she shined it away from a crumpled shape that might have been anything.
I made a move toward him, but Del stopped me, her hand icy on my wrist.
“I have to see how he is,” I said. I watched the shadow on the floor for some sign of movement, but there was none.
“We’ll call from the car,” Del said. “We need to get out of here.”
I sensed the urgency, the fear in her voice, and I knew William was gone. Was she afraid he might reanimate and slink after us, like the villains in horror films?
Del dragged me along to a broken lower-level window, the place where she’d come in. The glass was gone, and the sleet blew past the caution tape wetting the floor, making the window ledge slick. It was nearly dark, and much colder than when we’d arrived. The sleet had iced the branches of the old trees, the few remaining leaves, and the grounds looked like an eerie fairy tale in the flashlight’s beam. We made our way through the little woods, the snow now layered with ice, and found the car, forlorn and dirty, still parked in the lot. I looked back a few times, watching for a figure trailing behind us, searching for William’s furious, heartsick face framed in one of the broken windows, but the path back and the windows of the place were dark and I couldn’t see anything at all.
Inside the car, we sat listening to the sleet slash the metal body, to the wipers mechanically moving back and forth. The smell of the asylum remained attached to our clothes and hair. Del had gotten behind the wheel. She kept shivering, the shaking making her whole body quake. I told her I would drive, and she refused. I got out my cell phone.
“Who are you going to call?” she said. “They’ll see our footsteps. They’ll know we were with him.”
Anyone else might have claimed an accident, called for help and gotten it. Not us. All of this was my fault, tied as it was to another time. Del put the car in drive.
“Wait, please,” I said. “We can’t just leave him.”
She put the car back into park. “The sooner we’re away from here, the better.”
I pictured William’s corduroy coat, his copper hair matted with blood. Had I somehow caused him to fall? Had he really been about to shove me down the stairs? Once again, the solid truth was lost to me. After David Pinney, even when I tried to re-create those moments—taking up the hammer, the sound as it met his skull—I could not.
The ice tapped against the metal roof. The wipers made their scraping noise.