By the Light of His Lantern Page 38

  Catherine said what she needed to. He squirmed in his seat, thinking it over. Or maybe he only thought about the money. Maybe he thought about how truly screwed he was, how unlikely it would be that he’d get away with any of this. Maybe he knew he’d come too far to turn back now.

  She shifted in her seat, leaned against her window. She could smell her own sour breath off the glass. She scanned the neighborhood for anyone who might see her, but all she saw when she looked outside was Lara in the basement, holding her life in the palms of her hands. Catherine had done this to her. She’d forgotten her own daughter. And it was this man, too. This child of a man, full of his own sickness that had changed her bright-eyed daughter. Except none of that was right, either. She didn’t know the answer, the cause. Maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe Catherine was fucked up, and maybe their father was a little fucked up, too. But who knows that, really? Who knows until it’s too late that they were never parent material? She certainly hadn’t. And now she’d outlived both her children, if only for a few minutes. The universe was setting everything straight. What shouldn’t have been, now never will be.

  Her daughter was in her basement dying all alone.

  They were coming up to a four-way neighborhood stop. A table and chairs were set up there, a long plastic banner hanging from the front of the table declaring LEMONADE. A mother and father and their child tended the table, sitting back on their lawn chairs. Catherine reached a feeble hand to the crank on her door for the window and, numb in her elbow, turned it round and round. Rob shouted at her to cut it out. The window was halfway down before he leaned over and ripped her arm away from the crank. She lifted herself in her seat and pressed her face to the opening, the wind chilling to her sweaty face. Rob slammed on the brakes as they approached the stop. Catherine fell forward in her seat. Her shoulder hit the dashboard. She fell to the floor underneath. Cursing, Rob stepped on the gas, lurched them forward through the intersection, and Catherine fell the other way.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he muttered.

  She climbed back into her seat, turned herself around and plopped back like a slab of tenderized meat. Rob leaned over, reached past her to crank the window shut. Catherine felt an immediate cramp take hold, her stomach gurgling hot and soupy, and before Rob could finish she doused the back of his neck in her rancid midnight slime. He bolted upright in his seat, shuddering violently, jaw dropped in disgust. He gasped. He reached back to touch his neck but stopped himself, decided that feeling it down his back was enough, he didn’t want it on his hands, too.

  Catherine fell back again, temporarily relieved. She apologized under her breath with the most spite she could muster. She shut her eyes peacefully, feeling no peace at all except that in her stomach. The window was still partially cracked and the wind whistled through.

  “You’re dead,” he said. His voice whined, on the brink of tears. She turned to him, blinked dreamily as she watched him fighting his emotions. He drove with both hands on the wheel, knuckles white as Catherine’s face. She closed her eyes, listened distantly while he sobbed next to her. Maybe it was catching up to him now, Lara’s blood on his hands, the disaster he’d made for himself. Again, like ice poured over his head, perhaps Catherine’s sickness had jolted him back into reality. She looked at him once more, saw he was wiping tears from his eyes, crying so hard it was like he’d forgotten he was behind the wheel of a car…

  “Watch where you’re going!” she screamed hoarsely.

  There was someone in the road. A little girl. Catherine’s heart leapt into her throat. Rob opened his eyes in time to see her, in time to abandon all thought and spin the wheel in any direction that wasn’t straight ahead. The girl stopped, a surprised flash of mouth and eyes through a flourish of hair—a gut-wrenching instant of familiarity in Catherine’s chest, her depleted lungs. Tires squealed. The car rocked up onto the curb, onto the sidewalk. Catherine’s arms flew to either side in search of anything to brace against. They bounced over the sidewalk, rollercoaster-ed down an unexpected drop on the other side. A grassy slope of wild green peered at them through the windshield as they banged and jostled down like a ship along a perilous wave. Catherine slammed her face against the window. Rob cried out, cursing. At the bottom of the slope was a chain-link fence, and through it waited what appeared to be a tree-studded creek. They ate through the fence like a sheet of paper. Rob gave a final, woman-like bark. Catherine moved her hands forward to meet the dashboard as the hood crumpled against a tree. Her wrists cracked, all her weight piled behind them. Rob disappeared out of his seat. A gristly thud. The windshield flowered with jagged fissures.

  Then everything was still.

  Catherine wheezed. Her already-spinning vision was now a pinwheel in a hurricane. Her stomach bubbled. She scooted herself back into her seat, head against the headrest. She blinked, watched the sideways world teeter back and forth, slowly realigning itself more and more each time she opened her eyes. The windshield was webbed from one side to the other. Rob was folded underneath it on the dashboard. Apparently the airbags hadn’t deployed for either of them. A spray of bright red blood marked where his head met the glass. He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe.

  Likewise, Catherine could barely move, could barely breathe. Her chest felt sucked in on itself, as though her sternum and ribs had fallen on her lungs, pinching off any air she might have. She coughed—a knife in her back. A sleepiness so heavy rolled over her, she had to try considerably to resist it. It was easier to rest, but time wouldn’t wait for it. To sleep, she thought, was to die. To let Lara die—if she was still alive.

  She was only just able to pull the handle and unlatch her door. Her swollen wrists lit hot like fire, sparked with pain. She imagined her bones ground like gravel inside them. She saw her own blood there on the window, a cloudy spatter. It dribbled warmly down the side of her face and neck. She’d hit her head, but already she didn’t remember it. With the strength of a six-month-old she pushed the door outward and, when it didn’t budge, found it easier to simply lean against it. The door opened and she tumbled out onto the dirt.

  “Oof!”

  The knife in her back twisted. What little air she possessed released, left her gasping. The world, truly sideways to her now, turned upside down. She lay in the dirt, on her shoulder. This was as far as she was going to get, she knew. There was no part of her which didn’t hurt. She willed her arms to correct her, to sit up. She willed her legs to bend toward her, to get on her knees. Her limbs were on strike. She couldn’t feel any of them. Was she paralyzed? No, she thought. The crash was the least of it. This was her. The psychic. Rosaline. It was worming deeper and deeper inside her, and now it had reached her heart, her brain. This was her comeuppance, and it was final.

  She lifted her dimming eyes to the grass, up the slope where a sunshiny street lay hidden somewhere behind it. The horizon wobbled side to side. Everything blurred in and out of focus. Her own fingers, curled and lifeless next to her face, appeared foreign to her, blended. When a shape moved on top of the hill, approaching from the street, she struggled to see much beyond its general form. A short figure, thin and narrow. The little girl, perhaps. Catherine parted her lips to call for help. Her voice was gone. Once more she willed her arms to move, to wave the child down for help, but her fingers merely twitched. The small figure watched, unmoving, from the top of the slope.

  Don’t be afraid, Catherine wanted to say. Get help.

  The little figure moved toward her, cautious, step by step down the slope. She only descended a few feet before she stopped again. Maybe from that distance she could better see the accident, the violence, Catherine blinking wearily up at her. Maybe now she understood the severity. The emergency. The urgency.

  However, closer now, Catherine saw her better as well. As the darkness moved in from all sides, swelling down from the sky, flooding through the weeds, she focused harder, eyes nearly shut squinting. She fought the nothingness, caught it, fanned it away to her periph
erals so that all that remained was a halo of sight, the child on the hill. That familiarity tugged at her again. Her stomach convulsed inside her with something other than nausea for once. They held each other’s gazes. It seemed the longest time they remained that way, Catherine beside the dying car, the little girl up high in the weedy grass. Did she wish to say something, as much as Catherine did? Did they both look at the other with a vague sense of hope, a profound sense of longing?

  Catherine’s tongue danced behind her teeth. The corners of her mouth dared to hint at more than just the pain riddling her body. She couldn’t breathe, yet she smiled. She begged the skies above to carry the whisper lodged in the back of her throat, desperate to speak a name which for an entire year caused her nothing but grief. So long since she’d spoken it fondly. It dawned on her what a shame that was.

  Joy. Joy. Joy.

  It was her, come to deliver Catherine into a different life, now her earthly one was strangled out of her by forces even more dark and alien. I’m here! she thought. I’m here! Come and get me! Let me hold you!

  In the back of her mind it occurred to her what she asked. To be reunited with Joy, if it was real, if it was possible… Did she want it so badly? To have her again, would she leave everything else behind? Could it be that nothing else mattered? And as that thought came to be—blipped quietly into existence under all her mind’s noisy illusions—she heard it, like noticing the sound of a forgotten timer when it was almost too late.

  I can’t, she thought.

  Now she remembered. She’d made this mistake before. She wasn’t sure she could ever make up for it, but so long as she stuck around, she could try. She could do right by her for once… if there was a chance, even the smallest…

  As she came close to accepting her responsibility, another figure arrived. They stepped into view over the child’s shoulder. Taller, slender, feminine. The little girl looked back at the young woman. Like a beacon, she was framed in the light of the sky, growing gloomier by the second as Catherine’s senses slowly failed her. She was assaulted by that same overwhelming recognition. She knew them both. It was the worst kind of knowing. She felt herself physically deflated, her energy pouring out of her like sand from a bag. The young woman wandered down the slope into the darkening weeds, joined the little girl in standing and observing the wreck, observing what Catherine in that moment wished would be the final moments of her life.

  Though she couldn’t utter a sound, or move an inch, tears spilled warmly down her face and she flexed her useless mind against all the universe she could reach, willed it to hear her with head-throbbing magnitude. Her teeth pulsed. She demanded it all be undone. Everything. Take her back in time before that fateful night in that apartment complex parking lot, before she ever met the psychic, before she first looked into the young man’s eyes in that gas station. She would let him be. Let him go. Let it all go. They’d all suffered. Wasn’t that true? Did his suffering at her hand make hers any less? Would it ever? It was impossible to comprehend just how stupid it all was. How stupid she was. And most frustrating of all was the inability to change any of it. This was it. She’d brought herself to this place. Lara, too. That alone boiled her guilt into something angrier, wicked. She deserved this, but not them. This wasn’t the reunion she hoped for.

  I’m sorry, Joy. I’m sorry, Lara.

  Soon she’d join them at the top of that weedy hill.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Make Things Right

  What came next was a voice.

  “Well, there goes that,” the girl said, returned once more.

  Lewis buried his hands in the sand, unearthed them, buried them again. The scent of smoke circled him.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

  Lewis shook his head.

  “Maybe this wasn’t the way out after all,” she said. She kicked sand next to him, thinking. “Maybe that guy with the bird was—”

  “Maybe this was the way,” Lewis said. “And I fucked it up.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is.”

  She plopped in the sand next to him. He felt her fingers on his arm and he leaned away.

  “Please, don’t. I can’t stand it.”

  “I want to help you.”

  “You can’t help me, you’re dead.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  In the still dark, Lewis’s sobbing was loud as the crackling fire before it. He couldn’t contain himself any longer. Those tiny fingers touched his arm again and he was too absorbed by the surf pounding inside his head to notice.

  “You’re not here,” he said. “You’re not real. You’re not here. You’re not anywhere, thanks to me!”

  The fingers relented. She moved, got to her feet.

  “You didn’t mean to,” she said. Her voice was so stern for a girl. “It was an accident.”

  “I don’t know why I drove away. I left you there. How could I do something like that… I don’t know why I did that.”

  “You were scared.”

  “That’s no excuse.” He snorted, wiped his eyes dry. “I’m not a kid anymore, like you. There’s no excuse good enough for what I did… I deserve to be in this place. I deserve worse. You don’t get to live anymore, why should I? Tell me that!”

  “Because it was an accident.”

  “Driving away and leaving you there wasn’t an accident.”

  He sat, fuming in the sand until he couldn’t bear it anymore, and jumped up, stomped into the trees away from the ash, away from the girl. She followed after him, naturally.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the ocean. I’m going back. This is where I belong.”

  He pressed his way through the trees, hands wildly navigating between them. Her soft footfalls gave him chase, skipping and tiptoeing after. He wished he could make her disappear from this place as well. She existed only because the darkness reveled in his torment. Wasn’t that right? He had half a mind to stop where he was, pin her down under the trees and choke her out of existence a second time. Anything to be left alone. He’d go back to Mercy’s Shore and this time, instead of inquiring about ways to escape, he’d ask about ways to put an end to it all, to stop being altogether. In this place and all places.

  She grabbed him by the back of his shirt and pulled him to a stop.

  “Quit it!” she screamed.

  He spun on her. “What do you want? Let me go!”

  “No!” She slapped him once on his chest, her one act of defiance against him. “You let me go!”

  He recoiled. She huffed and puffed next to him, and though he couldn’t see her he felt her scorn nearly setting him aflame. Idly, he touched the spot where her hand had struck him.

  “So you feel bad, big deal!” She paced around him, snapping twigs under her shoes. “So you want to… what, die? Like that’ll make us even or something?”

  “That’s not—”

  “If I were real, and you really were talking to me right now, do you think that’s what I’d want? You’ll make it up to me by making me responsible for your death, too?”

  “That isn’t—”

  “Can’t you just be sorry?”

  “I am! You don’t know how much…”

  “Well…” She stopped her stomping and stood before him, panting. “That should be enough. It’s enough for me.”

  “It’ll never be enough for me,” he answered.

  “Yeah, well… not everything’s about you.”

  Now it was she who walked away, continued through the trees. Lewis, after a moment of trying to process everything, followed her. They reached the other side. The ocean purred gently on the shore.

  “Where are you going?” Lewis asked.

  He would have bumped into her had she not stopped him by the sound of her voice, standing near the ebbing water.

  “If you really want to make up for it…” They were standing side by side. Lewis looked at her, toward her voice as she spoke, and in an insta
nt, miraculously, he saw her. A bright cone of pale white light shone over them, lit them up like gravestones. She peered ahead, eyes above the ocean. Lewis allowed his sight to be guided by hers and he turned to see what it was, the spotlight marking their place on the beach. It hung over the ocean, highlighted the edges of its rolling waves like silver.

  The moon.

  Her final words to him: “Now’s your chance.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The moon brightened, so much so he had to close his eyes against it. His head throbbed. There was an acute pain in his lower back, a need to be stretched or twisted. His neck, too, was suddenly coiled with tension.

  And… was he lying down?

  He cracked his eyes, peeked again at the blinding light. It hung over him, a suspended white orb. Behind it he saw a wall of… wooden beams, running parallel. A ceiling.

  As it began to seep in, and he realized what had happened, where he was—or rather where he wasn’t—in his chest started a steadily increasing thrum. He thought he’d lift his head, sit up, see his surroundings, but wasn’t prepared for the pain running through the nape of his neck, the base of his skull. His muscles were all kinds of knotted. He searched his body in disbelief, patted his belly, his chest. That’s where he found the photograph. He brought it to his face, blinked his tired eyes. It was his photograph. His father and himself, just a child. A mess had been made of it, smeared with something still wet. Blood. An odd pattern of lines and dots, what he could make of it.

  There was a terrible smell in the room but he couldn’t place it.

  Gingerly, he supported himself on his elbows, lifted himself to a sitting position. There was a burning sensation in his arm. He winced just craning his neck to see it. He’d been cut, apparently. The blood on the photograph must have been his. And there was more blood, too, on his other side. A smear of blood on the cold concrete, though that arm appeared untouched. And then—

  He gasped.