Write a story that includes a song and a secret.
Floyd, what’s over there? Oh shit.
The man’s voice speaking these words were vaguely familiar, but the words themselves were just a disconnected dialogue, the kind of thing you heard when you were channel-surfing with the remote. Still, that was the start. Even before she saw the little girl in the red pinafore clutching the dirty doll, there were those disconnected words.
But it was the little girl who brought in on strong. “Oh-oh, I’m getting that feeling,” Carol said.
“What feeling?” Bill asked.
“You know, the one you can only say what it is in French, help me here.”
“Déjà vu,” he replied.
“That’s it,” she turned to look at the little girl one more time. “How much further?”
“Once you get over into
Second honeymoon, that’s what you call this, she thought, looking at the palms that lined Highway 867. Things had been different at the start. Bill, whom she first met at a high-school dance, had dropped out of school when Carol got pregnant. Her parents practically disowned her when they got married. They had asked why she wanted to marry that boy when anyone could tell he was shanty, how could she fall for all his foolish talk, but what could she say? Bill was all she had.
It was a long distance from that place twenty-five years ago to a private jet soaring at forty-one thousand feet; a long way to this rental car, which was a Crown Victoria – what goodfellas in the gangster movies invariably called a Crown Vic.
Floyd? ...Oh shit
There it was again, and that feeling too. What was it again? Something with a vu or vous. Where had she heard it before? It was on the tip of her tongue, but she just could not summon it, as if it were some kind of secret her mind was keeping from herself.
Overhead is a sign with Mary the Mother of Jesus, she thought, just beyond this curve. They rounded the bend, and there was the sign. It seemed like the same Mary that once hung above her fireplace. The Mary with the look that made you feel guilty of thinking impure thoughts when all you were thinking about was a peanut butter sandwich. Beneath Mary, the sign said: Mother of Mercy charities help the
Carol was raised in a family of devout Christians, all of whom told her she would pay for her sins in Hell the day she told them about Bill and their accidental child.
Bill was pointing. “There – see? I think that’s Palm house, no not where the billboard is, the other side.”
Her head itched. She scratched, and black dandruff began falling past her eyes. She looked at her fingers, and was horrified to see dark smutches on the tips; it was as if someone had just taken her fingerprints.
“Bill?” She raked her hand through her hair and this time the flakes were bigger. She saw they were not flakes of skin but flakes of paper. There was a face on one; it appeared to be Virgin Mary.
“Bill?”
“What? Wh –” Then a total change in his voice, and that frightened her more than the way the car swerved. She turned to him and saw that his glasses were melted to his cheeks. One of his eyes had popped from its socket, and then spilt like a grape pumped full of blood. And I knew it, she thought. Even before I turned, I knew it. Because I had that feeling.
From what seemed like almost a mile away, Iron Butterfly sang “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on the radio. She was screaming.
“Carol?”
It was Bill’s voice. She opened her eyes to brilliant sunlight, and her ears to the steady hum of the Learjet’s engines.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, just a nightmare.” She tried to remember the details of her dream, but the more she thought, the less she remembered.
“Floyd says we’ll be on the ground in –”
“Who?”
“Floyd. You know, the pilot. You really okay?”
“Yeah, I’ve just had that feeling, you know, the one you can only say what it is in French.”
There’s a car outside the plane, she thought, when they had finally landed. A Crown Victoria – what gangsters in a Martin Scorsese film would doubtless call a Crown Vic.
There it was, just as she had imagined. Where had she seen it before? If only her mind would let go of the secret it was keeping from her. The feeling came back, the vu-vous feeling, this time stronger than ever.
She saw a billboard with Virgin Mary on it, and recalled her parents threatening that she would burn in Hell for her sin. She faintly heard an old Iron Butterfly song in the distance. Then bad something had happened.
She shook the feeling off; it was her honeymoon, nothing was going to happen.
But it still lingered, faintly, unnoticeably…secretly.
