Kelly and Lazarus

“ripple” - MR Summerville

She almost swiped left on Lazarus. He had a heavy, shadowed brow, the kind you find on guys who’ll flush your pet fish down the toilet after a fight, and she wasn’t looking for any trouble. But she was looking for an omen. And in his last photo she could’ve sworn he was crouched before the ice box at the gas station outside of town, the one where she used to take her little brother to grab bug juice and teriyaki sticks. That was enough of a sign on a quiet day; she knew God’s workings weren’t always grand.

She agreed to meet him in his parents’ garage. She knew as soon as he texted coordinates instead of an address that it was the exact sort of place he’d suggest if he wanted to kill her, but her aging coworker Fran had told her last week that she needed to take more risks, and Fran wore cut gloves on both hands to use the mandoline slicer, so Kelly knew it was time. Besides, if he killed her she wouldn’t have to go in to work, and Keith would have to make a dozen futile calls trying to get someone to cover her shift, and wasting Keith’s time was one of her primary sources of joy. Anyway, Lazarus didn’t kill her. He put a hand on the small of her back as soon as she stepped onto the driveway and began steering her around his front lawn, pointing out radishes and rusty garden gnomes, but his touch was light and his diction proper. He even asked her what she liked to do in her spare time and didn’t seem at all upset when she said that mostly she watched her roommate play video games. (Landry was a professional, she assured him; other people paid to watch him.) Then he showed her into the garage, where twenty-ounce cans of tomato sauce and baked beans and tuna were stacked floor to ceiling like latticework, and told her it had been this way since Y2K. “That whole deal scared the hell out of my folks,” he said. “They tried to drown me in the well and everything.”

“The well out front?” she wondered. “With the vines?” It looked far too small to fit a toddler.

“That’s the one!” Lazarus broke into a wide grin. “Dad had me dangling by the ankles, but I guess he got second thoughts when I started hollering.”

A small silence stretched between them. Frantically Kelly searched for something else to say, and ended up asking him why they’d kept so much tuna around—all these years. At this he cocked his head and frowned with such genuine chagrin that she worried, for a terrible moment, that she had mortally offended him; but then he let out a single peal of laughter, high and clear as a bell, and said, “Maybe for the rapture.”

That she could understand. Her father used to make them list out their sins at bedtime each night in case the Lord decided to return while they were asleep. So Kelly nodded and smiled at him as warmly as she could muster, and didn’t argue when he asked her out of nowhere if he could have this dance. After a few steps she recognized the swing routine they’d been forcing fifth graders to learn in P.E. since at least her granny’s day, so she gave into his clumsy motions and let him fling her about the concrete in silence. She resisted the urge to ask for some music, even after she spotted an old boom box huddling in the corner behind a few reams of toilet paper. You are an instrument of God, she reminded herself. Wait and see what He will do with you this time. But just when she had closed her eyes and was starting to feel more whimsy than dread, Lazarus pulled her out of a dip and asked her to drive him into town. He knew how to drive, he said, but he’d never gotten his license, and the cops had finally caught on. They’d promised to stick him in jail if they ever saw him behind the wheel again. So Kelly smoothed out her skirt and drove him to Main Street with the radio dialed down low, dropped him off outside the CVS. He wandered through the automatic doors without a second glance.

She spent a while, afterwards, trying to decipher what the omen had been. She’d been hoping he would confirm her suspicion that she ought to skip town; she’d been itching for a way out ever since her last first date, when the guy had started pacing while she sat on her hands on his flaky sofa and the slasher movie in the background lumbered toward a climax. She’d gone into the bathroom and called her brother Owen, staring at what she hoped were beard clippings in the sink, because she couldn’t bring herself to walk out the front door and she couldn’t figure out who else to call. When Owen pulled up, she had to hang off him like a K-9 to keep him from storming through the door and bashing the poor kid’s head into a wall. “He didn’t do anything,” she insisted, over and over again until he let her shove him into the cab of his pickup. And then she waited motionless in his front seat for what felt like hours, watching him vibrate with fury and relief. At last he let out a long and suffering sigh and set the horn blaring with one well-placed punch, then shook out his fist and said, “Where did you even find that guy?”

“At the laundromat,” she told him.

Owen squeezed his eyes shut tight. “Kelly, you’re killing me.”

And now whenever she was slicing onions at work she couldn’t stop thinking about that—killing him. It didn’t seem like it would be difficult to take either of her siblings out. She was sure she’d been only moments away from giving Owen a heart attack that night, and he’d had a few recent brushes with death all on his own. Last December, he had to take his semi down a runaway truck ramp in Colorado, got himself concussed on the headrest when the thing hit the gravel. Not even three weeks ago, their sister Neve had miscarried in the Target bathroom. That wasn’t even counting their little brother Riley, already long gone; Kelly was almost certain she had killed him, though she was strictly forbidden from saying so. He’d left for a hunting trip two years back and never returned, just days after she’d seen a grizzly in her sleep. His buddies found one of his pant legs bloodied in a blackberry thicket.

She still held out hope that Riley had survived, somehow, that he was growing a matted beard in the depths of some damp cave. On Easter she thought she saw him sitting at the bus stop on Boise Street, but when she said as much to Owen, he threatened to flatten her if she ever tried a joke like that again. She wasn’t joking, but she understood why he couldn’t handle knowing more. Hope was an unwieldy kind of uncertainty. That was why she knew she’d better leave before she could tempt the Lord to punish her again. Maybe it was pride to think she could distract the Lord with distance, but she figured that if she put a few hundred miles between herself and her family, He might cut them some slack.

But she had to act soon. The past few weeks she’d been bolting awake every night from dreams that one of her siblings had died and she was standing over them with a butter knife in her left hand and one of their organs in her right, bloodless and faintly pulsing. (The organ selection rotated every day or two.) Each time she had to give them a call to make sure her dream was not intuition. When it was Owen’s turn, after the sweet momentary release of hearing that he seemed to be alive and in possession of his kidneys, she concocted a sloppy excuse that she was seeing someone with the same name. “Kelly, I swear to God—” he began, but she hung up before she could hear what he promised. She didn’t need any more oaths.

What she needed was a sign. That God did indeed intend for her to quit her job, leave Landry in the lurch, and find somewhere sturdier to torment. She had hoped the sign would come in the form of a tall, muscular man offering to whisk her away; maybe he would need a plus-one to an island wedding in Greece, and she could slip off to the wharf during the reception, offer her assistance to an elderly fishmonger. Or maybe a vacationing musician would christen her his muse and take her back to his mansion on the coast—she didn’t even care which one, as long as his cooks served plenty of crab. But instead all she’d found was Lazarus, who had lived in this slack-jawed town as long as she had, even though she’d never seen him at the supermarket where he swore he worked. (Neve had mentioned, after a brief examination of his profile, that maybe she’d run into him last summer at the lake, though she couldn’t be sure. “Everyone just looks so different on the water,” she’d said, worrying her lip with her teeth.)

It would have to be enough. Kelly was already in deep; Lazarus had taken to calling her at odd hours of the day to tell her that she was on his mind. “I just saw a red-breasted nuthatch and thought of you,” he’d say, though she was pretty sure they’d never spoken of birds and that she couldn’t pick a nuthatch out of a lineup if she tried. Still, he was thinking of her—maybe that was the omen. Sometimes she let his calls go to voicemail just because it made him ramble, and then she got to play the little messages over and over again on her way home from work. No man had ever called her out of the blue, before, let alone left a voicemail. So when he showed up at the Dillweed halfway through one of her shifts, she felt her pulse quicken.

It was a Wednesday, late afternoon. He walked up to the counter, straight and rather buoyantly, and ordered a custom with every kind of meat and cheese they had, including goat—which not even the tourists chose—plus extra mayo, extra onion, no lettuce. Not a shred. She looked up from the register and said, faintly, “That’s going to be twenty-seven sixty-five,” but he just raised an eyebrow and asked, “You can’t give an old friend a sandwich?” So she relented. She told him she comped it, but in reality she sat across from him while he ate it, squinting and waiting for him to say something portentous, and then stuffed twenty-eight of her own dollars in the till as soon as he left. It was only after the bell on the door jangled behind him that she realized he’d called her “old friend,” and that she’d never mentioned where she worked. What a strange, strange man, she thought. But there was something in his voice.

Kelly waited a few moments to catch her breath, then rose to fish a bleach rag out of the bucket. As she made her way around the lobby, scrubbing mustard crust off the sticky tables, it began to gnaw at her—how had he found her? By closing time, she’d made up her mind. Either he was the trap she had long feared, the fatal conclusion to her string of ill-chosen boyfriends; or he was the deliverance she had long coveted, her ticket away from everything that was waiting so stubbornly for her to destroy it. She just needed to find out what was in his head. And for that, she had to catch him off guard.

Something was brewing in the sky when she and Fran stepped outside that evening. The sharp air churned madly around them, kicking up leaves sheer and brittle as crepe paper. Kelly waved goodbye to Fran, swept a few leaves off her windshield, and got into the car. For a while, she fended off any thoughts except to worry about the thick weft of rain clouds over the next hill. But as the turnoff to his driveway approached, she began to fear that she’d made a terrible decision—that she’d pull up to find his father dangling him into the well again, or maybe she would catch him introducing some other girl to the garden gnomes. Maybe he wasn’t even home, and his parents would accuse her of trespassing and decide to shut her up inside the garage with all their tunafish. But when she rounded the corner she spotted him sitting on the curb, propped casually on the heels of his hands. He did not turn to look at her, even when the car door slammed.

“How was the sandwich?” she called out from fifteen feet away.

Then his head swiveled towards her. After a second’s delay, he grinned and stretched his arms out wide, a friendly beckoning she could not ignore. “Kelly!” he said, so much louder than she had been. “It was superb.”

“I’ll pass your compliments to the chef.”

This she could do—play coy with a customer. She crossed the remaining distance between them, acutely aware of the way she loomed over him. Somehow he looked different from the first time she’d seen him here, different even from earlier this afternoon. There was a new color to his cheeks. But she had not come to flirt with him.

“Lazarus, how did you find me?”

She’d thought he would draw back and start stuttering, but he just beamed up at her with a broad and disarming smile. “I called every sandwich shop in town.”

He had asked after her! In her mind an image flashed of him leafing through the yellow pages, braced against the side of a gas station phone booth. Despite herself, despite all her best judgment, what little of it she had left, she knelt and took his face in her hands and kissed the crown of his hair.

“I’m so glad you did,” she said. She was surprised how much she meant it. “I’ll see you around, Laz.”

A new euphoria settled over her on the drive home that night, so soupy and foreign it almost made her sick. Landry must’ve smelled it in the air, because he stopped tapping away at his keyboard when he heard her kicking off her shoes and emerged from his room to frown at her. “You good, Kel?”

She never begrudged him his watchfulness; he was Owen’s old buddy from the high school football team, the only person willing to take her in when Cindy kicked her out.

“I’m great,” she said, realizing she’d likely never told him so before. “Thanks, Landry.”

*** 

Sleep snatched her up without a moment’s hesitation. One minute she was dreaming about her middle school boyfriend Tucker sticking his tongue down her throat, and the next she was standing on a mountain of gravel in a vast, open desert, drinking a rum and coke. There was sand and only sand in her line of sight, except for an empty highway and the back of a rotting billboard. She had a second to hope that Owen wasn’t here for her to kill, somehow, before a blank white semi crested the nearest hill, engulfed in an angry cloud of dust. Its outline trembled dizzyingly behind the heat waves rising off the asphalt. It picked up speed as it barreled down the incline, filling the air with the smell of singed rubber—and then it swerved towards her. In that moment she knew Owen was inside, and she was on a ramp. The eighteen-wheeler plowed into the gravel before her and began to slow, but not enough. Soon it was only twenty feet from her and she could see Owen’s face through the windshield. It didn’t occur to her to step aside, only to lift her hand and wave at him, Princess Diana-style. He did not wave back. His face was flat, if furious. He jerked the wheel to the left, and a cry lodged in her chest as the truck tumbled over and over itself, rolling off into the distance like a toddler down a hill, until it dissolved into the ocean of white that had suddenly replaced the desert.

She woke in the hallway with her hand on the dial of Landry’s gun safe.

“Owen told me you were crazy, but he didn’t say you were homicidal.”

She whirled around just as Landry stepped out of the bathroom. He folded his arms and stared down at her, his mouth set in a terse line.  

“I’m not homicidal,” she said, but the whining note in her voice wouldn’t have convinced her, either.

“Then where do all my kitchen knives keep going?”

Something in her stomach recoiled.

“Your what?” she said, faintly.

“I’m kidding. I’m probably forgetting them all at work.” Landry shook his head. “Just don’t touch that safe.”  

She waited until his bedroom door shut behind him to take her hand off the dial. Then she pushed herself up and hurried back to her room. She wanted to collapse into bed, but something thrashed in the back of her mind. Sometimes, Kelly, Fran had told her once, you just have to say no to a thought. But this thought would not be denied; it had her heart pounding so fast she feared her chest might burst.

Gingerly, she peeled back her comforter, then sucked in a breath and pushed her mattress aside. Sure enough, there they were—a pair of butter knives lay crossed upon the box spring.

“Okay,” she said, slowly, willing her palms not to shake. “Okay, Lord, I get it. I’m going.”

It seemed her time was up; God would not tolerate her here much longer. It was honestly quite generous of Him to be so transparent about it. Kelly comforted herself with the thought that it was high time she got out of Owen’s hair, anyway. He had been so smart, aced all his math tests; he could’ve gone to Harvard if he hadn’t been suspended so many times for jumping boys who said dirty things about her chest. She knew it wasn’t her fault that her breasts had grown before all the other girls’ did, but it was her fault that she kept calling on Owen long after she was capable of defending herself. She had pepper spray now, and a job, and she kept her nails filed into points. And she’d done her research; guys in blue states were supposed to be ass men. There were places she could go to be safe. 

Lazarus picked up on the first ring. When she pulled up to his driveway for the second time that day, he was sitting on the same dip in the curb, in the dark, a slim backpack balanced against his knee.

“You’ve really never left Montana?” he asked as he settled into the passenger seat.

She shook her head.

“We better do something about that, huh?” He slung an arm behind her headrest. “You know, I’ve been waiting for a call like that all my life.”

Kelly smiled, turned the heat up. “Will you play some music?”

He nudged the knob for the radio and sifted through the static until they found something palatable. He called it jazz, but to her it sounded rather like a circus tune. They got as far as Main Street before she realized she had not planned a destination.

“Go west,” he said. “I want to see the water.”

That was good enough for her, and she hoped it would be good enough for the Lord. They drove until her eyelids began to droop, somewhere deep into Idaho. “I’d offer to take over,” Lazarus said, “but those state troopers have eagle eyes.” Instead, he pointed out a motel on the side of the highway, set back on its haunches, its neon barely glowing. He paid in cash and insisted on swapping the change for several gumballs from an ancient machine before they went up to their room.

At the end of a long, pulsating hallway, Lazarus stopped in front of the final door and slid his keycard into the slot. Inside, two twin beds waited a stubborn distance apart. Kelly’s heart lurched in her chest, wondering what he’d told the receptionist, how they’d managed to leave the state before he had even tried to kiss her. She hovered in the doorway while he dumped his backpack at the foot of one bed and sank straight down onto its duvet. Then she took a breath and crossed the speckled carpet to sit beside him, obnoxiously close.

Lazarus sat up and glanced at the gap between their legs with wide eyes. “Is that what you want?”

How was he shocked? Of course she wanted him. She always wanted them, so intensely she couldn’t stomach it, even when she had the vague suspicion they might want her dead. And that’s what it came down to, wasn’t it? He was nothing like the others. The man was brittle-boned as a bird. And she had put him in harm’s way by bringing him along. Unwittingly she imagined his pink cheeks draining white in front of her, leaving her stranded in Idaho’s seediest motel. “Yes,” she said, though it felt like barkdust sliding down her throat. “But I don’t want to kill you.”

She expected him to pull away from her in horror, but he just laughed—there it was again, that familiar, keening chime.

“Kelly, I don’t think you could kill me if you tried.”

Before she could litigate the point, he lifted his thumb to her jaw.

He survived. Afterwards they lay side-by-side like matchsticks, their arms spilling off the little bed. She allowed herself a moment of disbelief; then, just when she’d closed her eyes, she heard his voice out of the brief dark.

“Why don’t we keep on driving?”

Kelly turned heavily towards him. “It’s two in the morning.”

“We only have a few more hours left,” he said, low and hurried, almost like a plea.

“You’re not even the one driving.”

He gave her a wounded look. “Don’t you feel alive right now?”

Oh, she felt something, all right, but she couldn’t tell what. It was somewhere between adrenaline and an itch. “Fine,” she said, sliding her feet to the floor. “But you have to smack me if you catch me nodding off.”

Lazarus grinned deliriously and tapped her on the back of the arm. “Of course. What kind of man do you take me for?”

He was asleep in the passenger seat in twenty minutes. After the first silent hour, she was sure that the beams of her headlights slicing through the fog would be burned into the backs of her eyelids for days, if she ever got to close her eyes. After the second, she caught herself furnishing the houseboat they’d buy together. After three hours she thought she saw Riley under a peeling billboard, hugging his knees and rocking erratically, a half-butchered bear in the dirt beside him. That jolted her awake and sent her veering into the shoulder of the highway, though it wasn’t the strangest place she’d ever seen him. But when they got closer she saw it was a torn-up bag of trash and the carcass of a possum.

After the fourth hour, she took the exit toward Seattle.

 ***

He opened his eyes when she pulled into a metered spot by a quiet corner of the harbor. She watched him swallow a yawn and stretch his body out long, his hands balled into dense little fists. “You did it,” he said, all warmth and pride, breaking into a sleepy half-grin. “You made it west.” Then he sobered. “Do you hate me for falling asleep on you?”

Somehow, she felt more tender toward him now, under the sallow glow of the sun through the fog, than she had when he was shiny and spent in bed next to her. “I could never hate you.”

That earned the rest of his grin. He shrugged off his sweatshirt and opened the passenger door. “Let’s put our feet in the water.”

There was no beach before them, only a narrow boat launch and a brine-darkened boardwalk. “Do you think we’re allowed to be here?”

“What does it matter?” he asked, his voice inflated with a strange and rabid joy. “No one’s awake yet.”

She wasn’t so sure about that—everything must move faster in a city like this—but he was already charging down the ridged concrete into the water. He made it up to his knees, then reached his arms out wide, just as he had yesterday on the curb. And all the doubt slipped from her mind; now it was her turn to feel pride. He was hers, out here, out west, laughing like some kind of saint in the early sun. How had she managed to collect him along the path of her escape? She’d left for Owen and Neve, not for herself. But here he was, standing tall and happy, belonging to her, flesh she had touched only hours ago.

Just as she was about to ditch her shoes and join him, her phone seized in her pocket. Reluctantly, she lifted it to her ear—no matter how content she was, God forbid she ever reject a call from her brother—and turned away from the bright water to hear him better. “Hi, Owen.”

“Where the hell are you?” He spat the words into the speaker, half snarl.  

Kelly sucked in a breath. He was often harsh, but never like this. “I went for a drive,” she said. She didn’t want to tell him how far, or how permanent.

“A drive?” The line crackled with his anger. “Landry said you cleared out your dresser. He said you took everything. I thought you were dead, Kelly! I thought—”

His voice cut through the salt air like a hot scoop through ice cream. She winced and pulled the phone away from her cheek. 

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m alive.” And she hung up before she could slip and say what she wanted: Thanks to me, you are, too.

Then she turned back toward the bay—toward Lazarus. But where he’d stood she saw only ripples.

“Lazarus!”

Kelly shouted his name and, moments later, received its faint echo from the rock. She chewed on her lip, waiting for him to jump out from behind the hull of a boat and tease her for being so gullible. He’d been six feet in front of her; he couldn’t have gone far. But the ripples were fading.

She couldn’t wait any longer.  She kicked off her shoes and strode into the water until it lapped against her thighs, until she reached where he had stood, knee-deep. But there was nothing below the surface except the rocks beneath her toes, and the Sound was still and dark all the way to the distant edge. “Lazarus!” she screamed again, louder this time, the word catching on a hitch in her throat.

But there came no response save a squawk from a passing gull. A pot-bellied old man dozing on the dock in a plastic chair, ankles crossed, startled awake and squinted at her. “Honey, you can’t be swimming here,” he said. “It’s not clean.”

She backed out of the water and sank down onto the concrete. He’d left his chips in the car, and that old, stained sweatshirt; for a second, she let herself hope he’d be back. It was a foolish indulgence—some part of her already knew he was gone. How had she not seen that it was bound to end up this way? His bio had said his talents were water sports, ghost hunting, Irish exits. He was probably under a tarp in the bed of an old pickup, trundling down the on-ramp to the eastbound interstate. She shouldn’t have needed an omen to teach her what she already knew—that a man will always go along with you, but never all the way.

Then again, maybe he was simply at the convenience store across the street; maybe the unlucky soul with the morning shift had just flipped the sign on the door to open, and Lazarus was hunched on the other side of the counter, fishing out a few dollars to buy her a mass-produced pastry for breakfast, one that would taste only slightly of tin. Maybe his jeans were soggy to the thigh, dripping bay water onto the pockmarked linoleum. Maybe it was easy as that—she was heedless, he was speedy, he would be back soon with a kiss and a Gatorade, they would go houseboat hunting in the afternoon. He was Lazarus, after all. He owed her a resurrection. Unless his parents had actually managed to drown him in that well, years ago, and now God had come to collect him again, his second death. Maybe the bay had eaten him alive. Maybe the omen in the app had not been the gas station picture at all, but the one of him knee-deep in a murky lake, dead-eyed yet somehow smiling, brandishing a long and twitchy, apparently vengeful trout.

About the author

Elena Steiert is a writer from Portland, Oregon. Currently based in Seattle, she earned her MFA in prose writing at the University of Washington and previously studied comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her short story “Cavities” is forthcoming in Boulevard magazine.

about the artist

MR Summerville got her first camera when she was five; it was love at first shutter click. In fifty years of making photos, she’s shot negatives and slides in formats from 8x10 inches down to 8x10 mm, in black-and-white and colour, and printed large-scale images using digital, conventional, and historical chemistries. At the dawn of the digital age, she worked as a compositor and retoucher for a stock agency and a digital restorer for Kodak. Today, her style uses minimal post-processing. She lives in rural southwest Ireland and someday hopes to do justice to its natural beauty.