The Poor and the Haunted Page 16

  The two sat in silence for a while, eating ice cream. Kelly placed her head on Jimmy’s shoulder. Across the street a couple exited one of the payday lenders and entered a liquor store. Jimmy and Kelly did not judge. In the class structure of their neighborhood, these folks existed at least a few rungs higher than Diane. At least they had a steady paycheck they could use to repay the lender.

  Kelly looked up at her brother, and said, “Motherfucker don’t want none of this.”

  This time though, the motherfucker was Jimmy, and he knew it. He laughed, though he was scared Kelly would think she was part of what he wanted none of.

  “Kelly, you know—”

  She turned to face her brother.

  “I know. Jimmy, I know.”

  “Next year, right? You’ll be seventeen. Mom won’t fight it.”

  “An apartment. An apartment with a pool,” she said.

  Jimmy laughed. He was old enough to drive a thousand miles by himself, but still young enough to believe a thousand-mile ribbon of blacktop was all it took to heal an ugly scar.

  “It will get better, Kelly. A school year goes by fast. Before you know it, you’ll live with me.”

  Kelly closed her eyes and thought of living with her brother in an actual, real city. With mountains. No more flat, dusty Oklahoma. Just mountains and swimming pools and anonymity. She could just be Kelly, the new girl at school who lives with her brother. Or she could be no one, just another person in a city full of people who came from somewhere else.

  Either way, life after Diane sounded like heaven.

  “Oh, hey!” Jimmy said. “I forgot. I have something for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Hang on.”

  Jimmy stood and walked to the Camry, where he reached through the rear window and pulled out a plastic grocery bag. He carried the bag back and sat next to Kelly, pulling out a used Polaroid camera. He’d seen it in the window of a pawn shop on his way home from a shift at Derry’s a week ago.

  “Take pictures and send them to me.”

  “What pictures should I take? The view around here,” she said, gesturing to the businesses across the street, “pretty much sucks.”

  “I don’t care what it is. Make some cookies and watch Friends and send pictures to me.”

  “Jimmy, I—this is cool. Thank you so much.”

  Kelly felt the weight of her camera in her hands. It was substantial, real, and would never end up back at a pawn shop.

  She knew she had to hide it from their mother.

  Jimmy took the camera from her hands and said, “Sit still.” He stood from their bench, turning around to point the camera at Kelly. He looked at his sister through the viewer but didn’t take the photo. He moved the camera away from his face and set it back down on the bench. He grabbed what remained of his ice cream cone, and before she could stop him, wiped a bit of vanilla on the tip of her chin.

  “Hey!” Kelly said, but she laughed as she said it. She was smiling, ice cream on the end of her chin, looking like she was going to stand up and punch Jimmy when he took the picture. The insides of the camera whirred and produced a photo that Jimmy would one day frame and place on an expensive countertop in Phoenix.

  “I’m going to keep this one,” he said.

  “You better not show anyone that.”

  “I won’t,” he said, though he knew it was going on the mini fridge in his dorm room, where some boy would inevitably ask about the girl in the picture.

  “I love you so much,” Kelly said.

  “I love you too,” Jimmy said.

  “Love you, Ross,” she said, kicking his foot.

  “Love you too, Monica,” he said, kicking back.

  This second time Jimmy left Oklahoma without his sister wouldn’t be any easier than the first. He was happy about that. If it got easier to leave her even once, it just might get easier to leave her altogether—to put her in a box of crap labeled “Oklahoma” and just get on with his life.

  They stood together, knowing it was time to say goodbye. They hugged each other tight. Growing up, Ronnie and Diane only touched their children in anger. Hugs and heads on the shoulder were all the physical affection Jimmy and Kelly got, and they had to get it from each other. That, and a backslap and half-hug from Carlisle—which was good too.

  “I love you, Kelly.”

  “I love you too, Jimmy. I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too.”

  Jimmy looked out over the top of his sister’s head at the neighborhood she was still forced to call home. Anyone who never lived in a place like this viewed the families who go in and out of payday lenders as victims or users. Jimmy knew it wasn’t so simple. The two people responsible for his and Kelly’s existence were both.

  “Hey! I forgot to tell you. I’m coming back for Thanksgiving!”

  “Really? How?”

  “Carlisle will help.”

  “Why don’t you call him Mike?”

  Jimmy thought about it.

  “I don’t know. I don’t like calling mom and dad…mom and dad. You know? At school when I—if I talk about them, they’re Ronnie and Diane. Carlisle—I like calling him by something more than just Mike. I tried Detective Carlisle once, but he hated that. So, it’s just Carlisle.”

  Kelly punched her brother in the shoulder and leaned in for another hug.

  “You think too much,” she said.

  Jimmy kissed his sister once on the top of the head, then walked toward the Camry.

  “Bye, Jimmy.”

  “Bye, Kelly.”

  “See you for Thanksgiving!” Kelly yelled, waving one hand. Her Polaroid sat on the bench. Jimmy looked at her and wrinkled his nose. Hide that, his nose said, or mom will pawn it. It didn’t need to be shouted across the parking lot.

  Their signal was good enough.

  Jimmy got in the Camry and backed out of his parking spot, waving once more as he turned onto the street. Outside his window, he passed places the motherfucker wanted none of: smoke shops, pawn shops, a strip club, vacant buildings with plywood windows. He looked in his rearview mirror once. Kelly took photos of the Camry as it drove away. Seeing his sister fade from view, Jimmy Lansford tried not to cry.

  Jimmy Lansford did not succeed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  2019

  On the living room floor of an expensive home on the edge of Phoenix, illuminated by the softly pulsing light of a large television, sleeps a family of four. The parents lie next to one another. The dad’s head rests on the mom’s shoulder as the two hold each other tight.

  It is the same way they held each other the first time they spent the night together.

  Next to them lie their son and daughter, fifteen and twelve years old. Though the two siblings love each other, they do not have the intense bond the father once had with his sister.

  They don’t need to.

  A real, complete family lives in this home, and the love needs to be spread around. No one has ever had to defend one family member from another. The only time anyone has hid anywhere to avoid being found by a parent was during a game of hide-and-seek, and even then, Jimmy, Jonathan, and Jessica stopped playing long enough to help Jill get out from under the kitchen sink.

  After Jimmy stopped crying in the bathroom, Jill made them a family floor bed—something they hadn’t done since Jonathan and Jessica were much younger. They turned on their favorite show, and Jessica fell asleep with her head next to her brother’s shoulder, a Twizzler straw standing in an inch of warm Mountain Dew next to her.

  O
bserving her family, her presence visible by the varying brightness of the television and a reflected smudge on the sliding glass door, Kelly Lansford saw the resemblance—a resemblance that would still exist if Diane hadn’t smashed the Firebird into a tree in a front yard in Oklahoma. Here, in Phoenix, there were no front yards. Just rock and cactus.

  Kelly liked that.

  But the connection between Kelly and Jessica was about more than just hair color and a nose that could wrinkle. Kelly knew she was part of Jessica, and Jessica a part of her, woven together by something older and more lovely than just a double-helix.

  She didn’t understand how she got here, but when she heard her brother cry she came running—just like he always had. She first found Jimmy in a room in the nicest hotel she had ever been in. She just wanted her big brother to know someone was keeping watch, even when he was so far from his family. Later she saw Jimmy staring at his own eye at the birthday party, and had come again, trying to mimic the hugging-from-behind thing she saw her brother’s wife do.

  The storage unit was another matter altogether. Though she loved her brother, she was angry when she saw her ashes in the same box with their mother’s remains and their father’s suicide note. She understood better than most the body was just a vessel and dust was just dust, but she would not be just another one of Jimmy Lansford’s Oklahoma nightmares.

  Kelly’s dust did not need to be on the mantle, but she deserved better than a dark and lonely storage unit.

  While she had nothing to do with the footprints, she did try to take part of Jimmy back to Oklahoma, but not to see any home they ever lived in. She wanted to take the essential part of Jimmy Lansford—the same part of Kelly that still existed—to the living room of Mike Carlisle as he planned a Thanksgiving trip to Phoenix. Carlisle was excited to see the little brother he hadn’t seen years, and she wanted to show Jimmy how much this man still loved him.

  She wanted to show her brother that not everything and everyone from their childhood was worth forgetting.

  In a couple of months, Carlisle would be at this house for Thanksgiving, and so would Kelly. This was her family. This would be her home now, too. She would take up residence in the attic, coming down to check on her people when they needed checking on.

  What they never commented on, but all felt, was the way their hearts occasionally pulsed brighter, and not the red-fibered muscles in their rib cages responsible for pumping blood, but the unchartered part of the human mind that could—with the right jolt of electricity—expand and expand and expand until they all—especially Jimmy—understood real love could never end with an anguished scream in the front yard of an abandoned Oklahoma meth house. Real love never ends with anything—no matter how final the illusion of an ending may seem—because real love simply never ends. Ever.

  While Kelly would learn to be less intrusive than she had been over the past few weeks, she could still be useful. In her brief time living in her new home, she had learned how to set off car alarms and hide screwdrivers. She didn’t have eyes in the way one typically thinks of eyes, but Kelly saw the knife rack on the kitchen counter. Though she thought her brother would be okay, if Jimmy started pointing one at his eye, she would hide the knives.

  Kelly Lansford was where she always wanted to be: in a big home, with a pool, in an actual city, living with her big brother and being part of a real family.

  Her real family.

  She would watch these children grow, and one day she, Jill, and Jimmy would watch those children’s children grow.

  Together.

  As the air outside the home cooled down to what could decently be called a fall temperature, at least in Phoenix, her family slept on the floor. The TV was still on, glowing ever brighter. A character on the show looked at the camera and said, “My, how the turntables have turned”—and then the television winked out.

  The least she could do was try and mitigate her impact on their electricity bill—though, if countertops were any indication, her brother could easily afford having Kelly around.

  More than anything, Kelly was proud. It did not look like she hoped it would, but Jimmy had done it. He had figured a way out of the hole—even if he sometimes slipped, temporarily, back in.

  In his sleep Jimmy Lansford smiled. He smiled because he always loved that line about turntables, and even in his sleep he understood the line was a lot more than just a joke.

  But the way he wrinkled his nose when he smiled?

  He wrinkled his nose because fifteen feet away, as the display on his stainless steel oven glowed a deep, warm blue, a photo of a young girl with ice cream on her chin slid across a kitchen counter until it was next to a photo of the four people lying on the floor, the frames close enough to touch.

  ~End~

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have to say thank you six times before the close of this book.

  The first and biggest thank you goes to my wife, Megan. She served as a beta-reader and editor—even though this book borrows a significant portion of Ronnie Lansford’s suicide from the tragic, unexplainable, and violent suicide of her own father. In the aftermath of her loss she has shown courage, resilience, and bravery that is often unfathomable. She’s also the love of my life, and a constant inspiration.

  The second thank you goes to my brothers, Cody and Levi. To this day, if you take on one of us, you take on all of us—so be warned that a Facebook fight with one McKissen is a Facebook fight with all McKissens. Reviewers take heed. You have been warned.

  The third thank you goes to my children: Elizabeth, Dylanger, and Colette. Everything I do, I do to impress the three of you. Thank you for the inspiration and the motivation. I love the three of you more than you will ever know.

  The fourth thank you goes to the editors of this novel: Susan Rooks, Laura Novak, and John Baltisberger. Each of you made this book stronger and better.

  The fifth thank you goes to Reagan Rothe and Black Rose Writing. Not every publisher would take a chance on a horror novel written by a business journalist and consultant. Independent presses like Black Rose take chances on writers, not business models. Thank you for taking a chance on me.

  Finally, thank you to anyone who has ever read my writing, regardless the format or platform. All those likes and shares of my business blogs gave me the courage to pursue a dream I thought had died a long time ago. I hope to earn your continued support, and hopefully a royalty check here and there. It isn’t much, but dinner for five at Applebee’s doesn’t pay for itself.

  Dustin McKissen

  May 7, 2019

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dustin McKissen is an award-winning writer for a variety of publications. In addition to his non-fiction writing, Dustin is the author of the novel The Civil War at Home and the award-winning short stories Wife Number Six and My Name is Theodore Robert Bundy, and I am a Nixon Man. He lives in St. Charles, Missouri with his wife Megan and their three children. Dustin is a graduate of Prescott College and Northern Arizona University.

  Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/DMcKissen/

  Twitter – @DMcKissen

  LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/dustin-mckissen-53007056

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Word-of-mouth is crucial for any author to succeed. If you enjoyed the book, please leave a review online—anywhere you are able. Even if it’s just a sentence or two. It would make all the difference and would be very much appreciated.

  Thanks!

  Dustin

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