Fragile Darkness (13 page)

When he'd touched me, his face, his eyes, had been cloudy-night blank.

“How long?” he asked.

“Two weeks.”

“No, how long was he dead?”

Kendall lifted her eyes to his, hesitating before answering. “Six minutes.”

Without breath.

Without life.

Tears streaked down her cheeks. “We thought he was gone,” she sobbed as Dylan slid an arm around her and tugged her closer.

Death is but a transition …

But not everyone completes the transition. Some people came back. Some people got a do-over.

I watched them for a disjointed second, Kendall between Grace and Dylan, each of them supporting her.

“After he came out of the coma, what did the doctors say?” Dylan asked.

She looked up at him, swiping tears. “That he might be different. But he knew who I was, who his mom and his dad were, his sister. Everything seemed totally normal until later, when we were alone.” She squeezed her eyes shut, obviously remembering. “He started calling for his dog.”

The night held its breath, and so did I.

“I tried to tell him that Duke wasn't there,” she said, shifting to stare off beyond the trees. “But Will insisted his dog was right by the bed with a red Frisbee in his mouth.”

The wind slipped around us, soft, chilly, as a new picture started to form, and a new possibility.

Was Will imagining things, or was he tapping into something beyond, like Grace and I did? Was that what I was picking up on? And if so, what was
he
picking up on?

“I didn't know how to tell him Duke died when they lived in Seattle.” More tears spilled over. “That went on for a few days, but the doctors said hallucinations like that were normal with traumatic brain injuries, that there would be lots of stuff he didn't remember and needed to relearn.”

Like the black holes in my own memory.

“They said it would take time for him to sort out fantasy from memory, from reality.”

I'd been told the same thing.

Dylan turned to look at me over her head, and for a second it was like the Greenwood party all over again, touching without the faintest movement.

“He says it's not happening anymore,” Kendall said. “But sometimes I'd swear he's living in a different moment than I am, with different people.”

Because in all likelihood he
wasn't
hallucinating, something inside me whispered. He was like me.

That's why I picked up his distress call.

And, like I'd been not that long ago, he was on a collision course with something bad.

*   *   *

I didn't say anything to Kendall, because I didn't want to scare her, and I didn't want her to say anything to Will before I could talk to him. He was freaked out enough as it was.

Everyone dreamed and imagined stuff. Finding out that the things you saw or heard or felt were actually real and meant something, well, that took some getting used to.

Dylan knew. He didn't say anything, not to Kendall and not to me when we walked back to the car. But I knew that he knew. I could tell by the tight web of tension radiating from him, even when he moved. He didn't touch me, didn't look at me. He just walked through the woods back to his dad's truck, as if he was somewhere way far away, totally alone.

He unlocked the passenger door and I climbed in. A few seconds later he slid behind the wheel and put on his seat belt, flicked the ignition, and drove into the night.

Music played softly, something country. Neither of us moved to change the station. The clock read 1:07.

With one hand on the steering wheel, he kept his eyes straight ahead. I stared out the passenger window, trying to process all that had gone down.

“You okay?” he finally asked.

His voice, quiet, contained, totally unexpected, made me jump. I swung toward him, catching the glowing numbers of the clock out of the corner of my eye.

One eighteen. That was eleven minutes of silence. It felt like a lifetime.

Pushing out a breath, I searched for the right word.
Okay
wasn't it.
Surprised. Confused. Intrigued. Uneasy.
They came closer.

“It's always been so clear before,” I said. “The things I see, even when I didn't understand, like with Jessica and Chase—”

I broke off, but Dylan's eyes flashed anyway. I saw that, saw the lines of his face tighten as he stared straight ahead.

Biting down, I breathed in like Julian said to, pulling the air as deep as I could, for as long as I could, before exhaling.

“They were like little videos,” I said after a long moment. “Fifteen or thirty seconds playing in my mind. I didn't always understand what they meant, but I could see what they were. They were in color and they had detail. It was like I was right there, standing on the sidelines, watching.”

“But tonight was more like an X-ray?”

“A flicker, kinda like my memo—” I'm not sure why I broke off that time. I only knew that suddenly everything inside me knotted tight, holding back the words.

“Like your memories?” he asked quietly.

My throat burned. My eyes scraped like sandpaper. “Like a horror movie,” I sidestepped, “when the lights flash and all you get are these quick, fleeting images breaking through the darkness.”

Dylan slid me a look. “Before it goes dark again.”

Yeah. “Like that,” I said, “just a real quick image, but instead of going dark, everything went white like…” The realization stunned me. “Like when you die.”

With another look, this one longer, Dylan slid his hand from the wheel, toward me.

Before the warmth could tempt me, I pulled back.

“Is that what you think?” he asked, leaving his hand there for a second before returning it to the wheel. “That Will's going to die?”

“I don't know,” I whispered, haunted by the memory of Kendall's eyes. She'd lost him once. I couldn't imagine going through that a second time. “But I feel something around him, something cold and desperate.” Fear.

Gradually we slowed, finally stopping at an empty intersection.

“I-I know what that's like,” I surprised myself by saying, but once the words started, I couldn't stop them. “To see things you don't understand, that frighten you. That you can't explain,
can't change.
”

Through the play of light and shadows Dylan turned toward me, and for the first time since we'd left the park I looked at him, really, really looked at him, his wide cheekbones and the sweep of dark hair, dry now and falling against his jaw. And even though he faced me, I would have sworn that whatever he was seeing, it wasn't me.

“And you do, too,” I said. He'd witnessed so much, and never once had he doubted or asked for an explanation.

“You know you don't have to understand for things to be true or real,” I said. That's why he wasn't saying Will was some kid whacked out on drugs, or that the quick flash meant nothing, that I should forget about all of it and walk away, leave it alone. Because from the very first moment, Dylan had never doubted. Anything. Not my visions, nor the fact that I had to see them through. He'd never tried to pull me back or stop me. He simply went with me
like the perfect bodyguard.

“Is that because of my mom?” It made sense. Dylan had been exposed to the unexplained since he was a little kid. “Because of the work she did with your dad?”

The change was subtle, quick flares of little muscles in his arms and face I would never have noticed had I not been watching.

“No,” he said with more breath than voice. “It's because of mine.”

 

THIRTEEN

Earlier crowds and floats had filled the streets. Now, only beads dangling like thousands of glittering earrings from the trees remained.

No headlights cut in from either direction. No light at all, other than the faint glow from the dash.

“She loved music,” he said, looking beyond me, toward the darkened shotgun houses. “No matter what time of day it was, my mom had the stereo on. The house was never quiet.” He kept his right hand curled around the steering wheel, his arm a barrier between us. “Until she died.”

My chest tightened. I hardly knew anything about his mother, other than what his grandmother had told me when she'd called
my
mother a witch. Dylan never talked about her. Actually, he never talked about himself, either.

“That's what I remember the most after she was gone,” he breathed. “The quiet, the way it poisoned the house, like this endless, silent drone.”

There'd been a lot of that around the condo.

“The doctor gave my dad medicine to help me sleep, but I hated pretending like that, like everything hadn't been twisted inside out. It felt wrong. So I stopped. And one night I woke up in my room.”

The room I'd woken up in a few hours before, drifting in that soft cocoon of safety and dreams.

“It was dark and I was alone, but I wasn't afraid, and there wasn't the gut punch like there usually was. Everything felt okay, normal.” He looked directly at me, but I knew he no longer saw me. No longer saw the night. Not
this
night. “It took awhile for me to notice the music.”

My breath caught.

“And I forgot,” he said, the dull hoarseness to his voice saying how wrong he thought that was, that he'd forgotten that his mother had died.
“Everything.”

But I understood. Because sometimes it happened to me, too, in those first hazy minutes before the world crystallized around me, everything would feel all right. And for a heartbeat it was like being in the before all over again, and I'd do something like reach for my phone, or for Dylan, like I'd done earlier when I opened my eyes to find him leaning over me.

“It was like the accident never happened,” he said. “Like she was there and everything was normal,
because of the music.
”

I wanted to look away. The naked emotion in his eyes hurt in ways I didn't want to feel, not anymore. I didn't want to see inside his past like that,
his soul.

“I swung out of bed like it was Christmas morning and I was going to run in and find her sitting beside the tree.”

My eyes stung.

“Except it wasn't coming from Mom's stereo,” he said, quieter now. “It was my clock radio, playing her favorite song.” His chest rose, fell. “And I just stood there staring, realizing my dad must have turned it on.”

Already I knew that's not where this was leading.

“That went on for four weeks. I'd wake up at the exact same time, to the exact same song.”

Because when we slept, our consciousness slipped from the constraints of our bodies, and limitations fell away. When we slept, forever slipped closer, and possibility took over.

“I started locking my door, but the song kept playing, even after I pushed my dresser in front of the door and a bookcase in front of the window.”

And I could see him, see the little boy he'd been, with dark shaggy hair and bare feet dragging furniture across his room, to banish the music.

“That kind of music doesn't stop,” I whispered.

The breath ripped out of him. “Every night Elvis sang.”

Maybe a country ballad still drifted from the stereo, maybe he'd flicked if off. I didn't know, couldn't hear anything but the faint echo from a few hours before.

“Elvis?”

“She had a thing for him.”

“W-what song?”

Through the sweep of hair falling against his cheekbone, his gaze burned. “‘Can't Help Falling in Love.'”

No,
someplace inside me whispered.
No.
But the lyrics sang through the fringes of my memory, exactly as they had in those last moments before I opened my eyes at his father's house.

“She didn't believe in good-bye,” Dylan said. “Or endings. Only transitions.”

Love extends beyond any transition.

Vaguely I was aware of a car zipping around us. Only then did I realize we were still sitting at the stop sign.

“She always said if it didn't work out in this lifetime, then maybe the next.”

I made myself breathe. “The next?”

His eyes met mine, darker now, not those of the grieving little boy, but the guy who dove into rivers and ran into burning buildings, who didn't fear fear, who didn't question things that couldn't be explained, but
who knew.
Who believed.

“Life doesn't begin with birth or end with death, that's what she said. Every soul has a journey, and every journey takes lifetimes to complete. The end of one is merely the beginning of another.”

He didn't move. He didn't. But I felt him, felt the touch feather deep, deep inside me, in that place I would have sworn could no longer feel anything.

“Through them all, connections remain. Souls that touch, that connect, can never really separate, even if life carries them in different directions.”

Around us the night deepened, and I could hear it again, the soft whir of music from the radio. And the idling of the engine. And the wind from outside, pushing against the car. But the echo of his words played through me.

Nothing prepared me for the sudden slide of his smile. “She said I was her grandfather.”

I couldn't stop the quick smile. Kids coming back as parents? I knew a bunch of people who'd like to do
that.

“Did she seem like your
granddaughter
?”

A soft light played in his eyes. “Only when she chased dragonflies.”

One after the other, the zingers kept coming. Without thinking, I lifted a hand to my chest, but before I touched the cool bronze curve of my mother's amulet, Dylan's gaze followed my hand.

“She always said they're the souls of those who have come before us,” he said, and then his hand was there, slipping by mine to finger the greenish crystal in the center. “Darting by to see that we are safe, and to remind us of what is to come.”