When he located Becka’s grave, he would…what? Try to fall asleep again in hopes that she’d return to him in a dream, as she had earlier, and tell him whatever it was she wanted him to know? If she could visit him on Charice’s porch, over a mile away, surely she’d be able to contact him here, mere feet from all that remained of her physical existence. Whatever she wanted to convey had seemed urgent, though after this long, what could it be? The identity of her lover? Okay, but why now? That she’d come to understand in death what had eluded her in life — that it was he, Raymer, and not this other man, who she truly loved? Or that the time had come for him to stop obsessing about her lover’s identity and move on with his life? Maybe the reason she visited him there on the porch, after the lovely evening he and Charice had spent together, was to give him her blessing. It was possible. But so, alas, was its opposite. What if she’d come to warn him about Charice, that he was about to make a terrible mistake?
Given the swift approach of this new storm, however, would sleep even be possible? Exhausted though he was, he was feeling pretty wide awake. And even if he did manage to drift off, wouldn’t the first clap of thunder thwart him all over again? On the other hand, maybe sleep wasn’t the only means of summoning her. If she was a ghost and near to hand, maybe she’d just appear to him? If she did, what would he say? He supposed he might begin by apologizing for not having visited before now, that a better man would’ve grieved her loss instead of allowing himself to be consumed by the betrayal she’d been contemplating when she came down those stairs like a Slinky. Because for her to have fallen in love with someone else, she’d first have had to fall out of love with him, and he must’ve had some role to play in that. And while he was apologizing, now might also be a good time to admit he never should have married her in the first place, knowing as he always had that he didn’t deserve a woman as beautiful and smart and self-confident and talented and full of life as she was. Of course Becka would stray. How could she not?
The trouble with such abject groveling as an opening conversational gambit with a dead woman was that Becka would immediately identify its source as self-loathing, the very thing she’d always liked least about him. If after death some part of the old Becka remained, and he — face it, the aggrieved party — begged her forgiveness, he could all too easily imagine her dismayed response: Christ on a crutch, don’t tell me you’re still at it? But how was he to entreat her if not with kindness and understanding and forgiveness?
The only thing he could be certain of was that if Becka was a real ghost, then the conversation — whatever its content and form — had to take place tonight. Tomorrow morning her visitation at Charice’s would feel like a dream, and he’d interpret that dream accordingly, in the context of his own emotional need — his subconscious inventing her so that she could inform him it was okay to have feelings for another woman and to act on them. And tomorrow, in the cold light of day, sure, why not? Tonight, though, in the intimate dark, he wanted Becka to be real, to have come to him out of her own need, not his. Here in Hilldale he wanted more than cheap parlor tricks of his own devising.
Though of course all of this was assuming he survived the next half hour. Crazy, but he’d been treating the approaching storm as if it were a friendly presence, lighting his path to Becka’s grave, yet now that it was upon him — directly overhead, in fact — there was nothing friendly about it. A bolt of lightning sizzled audibly overhead a split second before illuminating his surroundings, and in that heartbeat, before everything went black again, he saw the ground was pocked with splotches of dull red. It took a moment for him to understand what he’d seen, that the earth beneath his feet was strewn with petals, all that was left of the beautiful bouquet of roses he’d noticed that morning. Which meant he was close. Becka’s grave was nearby. With any luck the next lightning flash would tell him which one was hers.
What came instead was the rain, all at once and furious, just like the earlier downpour in town, except now there was no dry police cruiser to duck into, no dim-witted Officer Miller to distract him from the deluge. What on earth had possessed him to come out here? he wondered, awed for the second time in an hour by nature’s fury. Why hadn’t he waited for the storm to pass in the comfort of the Jetta? In a matter of seconds he was drenched to the skin, the last of the charcoal ash leaching out of his hair, running in rivulets under his collar, down his back and into the waistband of his boxers. It occurred to him then that if this was a ghost story he was in the middle of, here was how it would end: in the morning he would be found, cold and dead, at the foot of Becka’s grave. Because in a ghost story Becka wouldn’t have summoned him to Hilldale in an electrical storm to tell him that all was forgiven. No, her ghost would be vengeful. She would’ve brought him here — Raymer swallowed hard — to kill him.
Still, if the knowing, sentient universe was waiting for that fatal symmetry, couldn’t he deny it by remaining right where he was? He had no idea who lay interred beneath these rose petals, but he doubted whoever it was had anything against him, certainly no reason to call terrible vengeance down upon him. The ruined bouquet of roses suggested this was the grave of a woman — someone’s beloved wife or sister or daughter. It didn’t really matter who she was, so long as she wasn’t…
REBECCA WHITT RAYMER.
The very name on the stone at his feet that he himself had grudgingly paid for. This was what that lightning flash had revealed, and when the world went dark again her name remained as sharp before him as a photographic negative. Rebecca Whitt Raymer. The thunderclap that followed the lightning strike shook the ground so violently that the wire cone used to hold the flowers in place tipped forward at a forty-five-degree angle in the loosened soil, as if offering him the thorny, denuded stems. The green cellophane that had served as a sheath was now flapping wildly in the wind, the small florist’s card somehow still affixed.
This, then, Raymer thought, dropping to his knees in the mud, was how Becka meant to communicate with him. An obscene giggle erupted at the thought. There would be no dream, no conversation. The florist’s card would contain a name. Raymer would read that name and finally would know. After which the lightning would find him. The knowledge he’d sought arriving in tandem with death. Perfect. Biblical in its justice, when you thought about it. The end of his selfish, foolhardy quest would be the end of him. Fair enough. Because he’d been, as always, an idiot. It wasn’t even knowledge he’d sought. There would have been some dignity in that. No, he’d been willing to settle for information, a lesser thing entirely. He’d wanted, and still did want, her boyfriend’s name. His identity. Beyond that he had given the man himself little real thought. Until just now, when he realized that these once-lovely red roses had been for Becka, it hadn’t occurred to him that maybe he wasn’t the only one haunted by her, still in love with her, unwilling or unable to move on. How had that obvious truth eluded him so completely? How many other failures of imagination had he been guilty of?
The one that troubled him most was Becka herself. In the short time they’d been married had he ever asked about what she was feeling or thinking, whether she was happy? There had been moments, especially toward the end, when he suspected something must be wrong, but she always denied it when he inquired, claiming that she just had a case of the blues, that she’d wake up feeling more cheerful in the morning. And he’d been all too happy to be reassured. Why dig deeper?