Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 26 - Busy Signals

The LaGrange Cabin - Lake Hazelton, North Carolina

David was stuck.

He was stuck trying to reconcile his last memories of saying goodbye to Olivia and the kids, of having just recently buried his mother, of getting on a plane with Jeremy for a kayaking trip, and now being here, in the cabin at Lake Hazelton. 

He was stuck trying to understand, as Jeremy attempted to explain over and over again, that apparently David died somewhere in between.  

He was stuck apparently stuck hundreds of miles away from his wife and kids, and stuck with the inability to reach Olivia on the phone.

And he was stuck with parents who should be dead and buried, despite the fact that he and Jeremy were now gathered with their mom and dad back on the screened-in porch of the Lake Hazelton property. 

Their parents — Charles and Charlotte LaGrange — sat straight and rigid upon the green cushioned chairs. Charles and Charlotte had yet to fully realize what had occurred. Charles, in particular, seemed practically lobotomized, having not uttered more than ten words since he, David, and Charlotte were mysteriously resurrected.

David, skinny as a toothpick and brown from the summer sun, hovered over the side table next to the kitchen door with the telephone receiver in his left hand.

Jeremy leaned against the doorway that led into the house, sipping a beer and absentmindedly stroking the head of Beckett, their Golden Labrador. Beckett died of old age the summer before David headed to college when Jeremy was overseas during his first tour of duty. Today, Beckett’s fur was just beginning to lighten with age.

The LaGrange family was together once again. Together in body but still always worlds apart.

“Read the number again, Mom,” David said.

The once-again middle-aged Charlotte LaGrange toyed with the vintage Bates metal-cased address book on her lap.

“Mom?” Jeremy said. “What’s the number?”

Charlotte was silent. Her finger slowly traced the right edge of the rectangular listing of names and numbers and long-forgotten addresses. She gently pressed down upon the embossed raised letters of the alphabet with their sharp gold letters.

“Olivia, you said,” Charlotte finally answered. “Right? What was her last name again?”

“Fogelman,” David answered. “You know that.”

“Fogelman,” Charlotte repeated. “I don’t remember ever putting that name in this thing.

“Here,” Jeremy said, moving to take the address book from his mother’s hand. “Give it to me.”

“I can do it, Jeremy,” she answered sternly and glared at her eldest son.

Charlotte slid the metal index tab down to the letter F and pressed the button on the bottom of the address book. The top flap popped open. In the space next to her, her husband Charles blinked in surprise through glassy gray eyes when the address book opened.

“I remember the Fogelmans,” Charles slurred. “A bunch of hick farmers.”

“What did you say?” Jeremy asked. He set down his can of beer and placed his fists at his sides.

“That Mickey Fogelman was about as dumb as a stump,” Charles said, more clearly now.

“Fogelman,” Charlotte said again as she looked at the address book page now opened before her. “There it is. I wrote it in here, after all.”

“Give it to me,” Jeremy repeated.

Charlotte looked upon the long index card opened before her with amazement. There was line after line of handwritten names and numbers written in different colored pens, green and blue and red and black, all in her meticulous curly-cue cursive penmanship.

“I don’t remember ever putting her name in this thing,” Charlotte said. “But there it is. And there’s Lucy Franks and Jenny Fontaine. I haven’t thought of those ladies in years. And Olivia Fogelman, right there.”

“We just had this conversation, Mom,” David said. “It’s an Illinois area code? You probably wrote it down my senior year.”

“Is that when you met? Senior year?”

“Yes.”

“Of college or high school?” Charlotte asked.

“Mom, give it to me,” Jeremy said even more firmly and snatched the metal address book from his mother’s hands. Charlotte stared at her hands as if she was still holding the address book.

“Jenny Fontaine,” Charlotte murmured as if talking in her sleep.

“What’s the number?” David asked Jeremy.

“Here.” Jeremy handed his brother the metal case, still flipped open to the letter “F.” He went back to his spot in the doorway and continued drinking his beer.

David held the receiver to his ear and dialed the number.

“It’s not ringing,” he said a moment later. “Just static.”

“Lines might have gone down,” Jeremy said.

“I had a dial tone just a minute ago.”

David hung up the phone, paused, then picked it up again.

“Still dead,” David said.

“I think we all might be dead,” Jeremy answered.

“We’re not dead,” David said. He set the phone back down in the cradle, his hand still resting on the receiver.

“There’s no answer for this,” Jeremy answered. “How we’re teenagers. How you, Mom, and Dad are right in this room after I buried all three of you. Dad, you’ve been gone almost ten years now. And Beckett here’s been dead nearly three times longer than that.”

“But that doesn’t dismiss the fact that we’re all here now,” David said. “And obviously not dead.”

“So what are you, then?” Jeremy asked. His eyes were rimmed red and he was breathing hard. “Zombies? The Walking Dead?”

“Really, Jeremy?” David asked. “Is that what you think?”

“Angels, then? Devils? Raised from the dead and forty years younger?”

“You’re forty years younger, too,” David said.

“David,” Jeremy whispered. “We buried you just last week. I don’t think you understand this. You died in my arms. Can you even comprehend why I’m so upset?”

“I would think you’d feel relief.”

“Relief? I should feel relief? David, I’m not kidding when I say that I think we’re all dead. It would make a lot more sense that we’re all dead and in some sort of purgatory than to explain how all three of you rose back to life and we’ve been, what? Transported back to the summer cabin again? Oh, and you and I are teenagers again, to boot? Seriously? How can I have relief when I can’t explain a single bit of any of that?”

“I hear you,” David said.

“And what year is this supposed to be, anyway?” Jeremy continued. “You know, maybe we’re not really sitting here right now at all. Maybe this is just a dream I’m having. Maybe I took some bad pills to help me sleep after your funeral and I’m just floating in some sort of nightmare hallucination. I might just be asleep on the couch downstairs in your living room. Because any of that’s a hell of a lot easier to understand, let alone believe, of how I’m having this conversation with my dead family — my dead brother — as we sit on the porch overlooking Lake Hazleton again. That’s a hell of a lot harder to believe than to think we’re all dead.”

“We’re not dead,” David said.

The phone then rang unexpectedly. Both David and Jeremy jumped. Charlotte and Charles sat unmoving.

His hand still on the receiver, David quickly picked it up and held it to his ear.

“Hello?” he answered. “Hello?”

A faint crackle came from the receiver, static, followed by complete silence, the halted sound of a clear disconnect without a dial tone.

“No one’s there,” David said.

“But it rang,” Charlotte said from the couch.

David hung up the phone again and immediately picked it back up.

“There’s a dial tone!” he said and quickly dialed Olivia’s number.

“If you’re trying to call her, maybe she’s trying to call you,” Charles said.

“What’s that?” Charlotte asked.

“That’s why you’re getting a busy signal,” Charles said. “Maybe that Fogelman girl’s trying to call you at the same time.”

“Damn it!” David said and slammed the phone back into the cradle. “Still busy.”

He picked up the phone again and started dialing.

“You hear that?” Charlotte suddenly asked and stood up on shaky legs.

A faint rumbling purred up from the lake, the familiar sound of an approaching boat, not yet visible from the line of trees that marked the northern and southern edges of their lake house property. As the rattling outboard motor drew closer, the noise grew louder, and with it the muffled sound of people repeatedly yelling out.

Jeremy walked to the window.

“The phone’s dialing!” David said excitedly.

“They’re calling for help,” Charlotte said.

“We don’t know who that is, Charlotte,” Charles said.

“Anybody up there?” they heard a voice echo up from the shore, but they still couldn’t yet see a boat. “We need help down here!”

To the south, through the high ridge of pine trees, so close and thick as to form a dense wall of dancing shadows, faint pinpricks of the last remaining light of mid-summer dusk poked through the tree boughs. The trees shielded their view from the direction where the humming engine sound originated. The waning sunlight danced and disappeared between the branches as quickly as it appeared.

Instinctively, Jeremy burst out the screen door and ran down the worn dirt path that lead to the narrow rocky bank of Lake Hazleton. Charlotte started following her eldest son out the door.

“Where are you going, woman?” Charles asked. “Get back in here.”

“Jeremy, wait!” David called out and pressed the receiver tighter against his ear. “It’s still ringing!”

“Your stupid big brother’s going to get himself killed,” Charles said. “Goes and passes out drunk on the boat in the middle of the night. Runs off to some Godforsaken war for no good reason other than his little bitty girlfriend broke up with him.”

“Hello?” David suddenly yelled. “Hello? No! No!”

“What?” Charlotte asked.

“It went dead again,” David said and defeatedly hung up the phone. “It was ringing and then the line just went dead.”

He lifted the receiver and listened again.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s dead.”

“David!” Jeremy called. His voice was faint and far away. “David we need your help!”

Several voices, both male and female, were calling out in a panic along with Jeremy’s calls for help. From the shore, a woman screamed a piercing, high-pitched shriek. The sound directed a chill down David’s back, a wrongness, a warning signal.

“David!” came Jeremy’s voice again.

David stupidly thought of Spiderman. He remembered reading comic books to Mark before bed. Kraven the Hunter. The Lizard. Doctor Octopus. These ridiculous characters would creep upon an unknowing Spiderman, triggering the hero’s tingling Spider-sense, that ringing harbinger that heralded impending doom.

David suddenly didn’t want to run to his brother’s aid, and yet he bolted out the door anyway.

As he ran, jumping over the exposed tree roots from the pine tree at the entrance to the path that lead down to the lake, the sound of the approaching motor turned suddenly from a faint buzz to a sizable roar. David watched as the boat turned the corner and came into view, the vessel’s front lights illuminating a swath of green and red upon the water.

“Over here!” Jeremy called out. He was standing at the far end of the dock.

“Hey! Help us!” the boat’s passengers screamed out upon spotting Jeremy.

David ran to his brother’s side.

“Do you have a rope to tie on?” Jeremy called to the boat.

The boat’s captain looked around, panicked.

“Yeah, man,” he said as the boat slowed to a coasting putter. “Right there. Hold on, I’ll grab it.”

Inside the boat, a handful of teenagers huddled close together, cradling a girl who was bleeding from her head.

David, who always stopped his car when he came upon an accident, who always rushed to the field when a child took a ball to the arm during Little League, who always offered help to mothers as they struggled to load both groceries and toddlers into their car, felt his own spider-sense at this moment.

He wished he was still in the house trying to call Olivia. He wished he understood all of what was happening so suddenly. And he wished he had stopped his brother from rushing so quickly to the sound of screaming voices.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash