Clear

by Jessica Park

  “Some kind of creamy seafood casserole with parmesan topping.”

  “Oh, man. He’s good.”

  “And homemade biscuits and blueberry cobbler.”

  Sam races down the stairs, and I follow at a more normal pace. While Sam might be fired up about a big meal, I know that Costa is going to be crushed that the vision power is still proving to be unattainable.

  I grab a bottle of wine and a glass and leave the guys in the kitchen. The sunset is gorgeous tonight, and I feel as though sitting out on the tiled patio area in a lounge chair might be just the thing to lift my mood.

  The sunset is just starting, and the sky is layered in tiers of color and clouds.

  Vision. Clarity. Sight.

  What am I missing? What the hell am I missing?

  Invisible, I think. My memories scream at me, memories from being in the stairwell at the hospital so many years ago. I’m good at being invisible.

  When the sun has sunk halfway to the lake and my glass is half gone, Costa joins me outside. “What’s up, pussycat?”

  “What’s up, CJ?”

  “Nice outfit.”

  I’m still in my robe. I pull the fabric more over my leg, and I shrug. “Too lazy to get dressed. Sunset was calling.”

  He leans back in the lounger next to me and squints into the view. “Sam told me. Just so you know.”

  I put my hand on his. “I thought it would work this time. It’s the right power to go after, and I’m trying so hard.” I can feel myself getting upset. “I am doing everything I can think of to will him to see.”

  “Hey, hey. Easy there. I know that.”

  “I made you come up here, probably the last place where you want to be, and I can’t fucking make this work!”

  Costa turns to me. “It’s not your fault, Stella. And being in Willow isn’t as bad as I thought. I’m closer to Toby here, and that’s a good thing.”

  We sit together silently until there is just a sliver of sun left.

  What am I missing?

  Sam steps onto the patio and seats himself on my other side. I’m relieved to see that he doesn’t look particularly hungover from his trip or surge.

  “Costa?” For some reason, I’m hesitant to ask him what I’m about to.

  “Yeah?”

  I take another drink from my glass, stalling. “I think that you’re not telling me something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Please tell me.” There is a truth that I need to reach. I can feel it. “I want the whole story. I know you have it. I just do. Tell me.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then, finally, when the tension becomes nearly unbearable, he speaks, “This is going to hurt. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Ice runs through me at his words.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Sam is less relaxed now.

  I glance at Sam, confirming that he has no idea what we’re about to hear.

  I say what I know to be true, “Costa has our missing piece.”

  “If you’re fucking with her—” Sam starts.

  “I’m not. I swear. I didn’t want to ever talk about any of this.”

  “Talk about what?” Sam’s edginess concerns me.

  “The story about who first tripped me—the guy by the cliffs.” Costa rubs his lips together and then takes a breath. “I made that up.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because I don’t like how I became a death tripper. The story I told is better. It’s how I wish it had happened, so it’s what I told you both. It should have been my choice. It should have been beautiful. Instead, it wasn’t. It was a nightmare that I’ve been in. I don’t love death tripping. I never have. But I’m trying to make the best of this. Maybe I’m trying to fall in love with it. Maybe I’m just an addict. I don’t know anymore. Anyway, I didn’t understand the importance of how I’d first tripped until recently, the connections that link us all together.”

  “Get to the point, Costa,” Sam snaps impatiently from his chair.

  I am less impatient and more terrified. I can feel the build that Costa is leading up to something that I will not care for one bit. Something damaging is coming.

  “The day that I was hit by a car in Chicago, when I was with you, Sam—”

  “Wait, you were the friend? Sam, when I met you in the hospital, you were there to see Costa?”

  Sam nods. “Yes. You didn’t know that?”

  “No. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. We’ve hardly talked about that day. It just really hasn’t come up. I don’t know what that has to do—”

  Costa cuts him off in an explosive confession. “That’s the day I was tripped.” He looks at me. “I was hit by a car when I was crossing a side street. I’d met a girl, and I’d left in the dark during an ice storm to go see her. I hadn’t been paying attention, and I’d stepped out in front of a car. It’d hit me, skidded, spun out, and hit a tree. And I died.”

  “Okay, so…what?” I ask.

  Sam’s expression gets dark. “A car accident,” he says flatly. Then, he looks at me. “Oh, Stella…”

  My stomach drops. “My father and sister were in a car accident that day. That’s why I was at the hospital.”

  “Yes,” Costa says. He waits for me to begin to process. “It was the same accident.”

  “My father hit you.” I feel sick.

  “Yes.” Costa looks sad now. “He killed me and your sister, so he tripped us.”

  I can’t form words or think or begin to understand what he’s saying.

  “When I went into your apartment to get your sweatshirt, I saw a picture that was facedown on the mantel, so I righted it and saw it was of your family. I know your father and sister.”

  I shake my head. “No, you don’t. You can’t. Shut up! Costa, shut the fuck up!”

  Sam moves his chair closer to me and takes my hand.

  “I don’t know why you’re making up this shit!” I’m furious with Costa for whatever twisted game he’s playing.

  “I’m not making up anything. It’s why I got so crazy that afternoon after I saw the photograph, and it’s why I tripped you. I was lashing out for what was done to me.” Costa sits up in his chair and faces me. “Your father is the one who tripped me, and he tripped your sister, too. He didn’t mean to kill me in the first place, but he brought me back on purpose. And your sister? Amy is not suicidal, and she’s not a drug addict. She’s a death tripper.”

  The bottle and glass fall from the arm of my chair and shatter on the tile. Sam restrains me before I can fully reach Costa, so I only get in one hard slap across his face before Sam pulls me back.

  But he can’t stop me from screaming and unleashing my full fury at the lies Costa is spewing. “Fuck you! Fuck you! I hate you!” I can’t stop throwing every four-letter word I know at him, and neither Sam nor Costa tries to calm me down.

  They must know it’d be futile to fight my rage. So, Sam just keeps his hold on me until my emotions eventually morph into devastation and uncontrollable tears. I close my eyes and fall apart.

  Costa continues, “Amy and I went under. She was right next to me in the darkness, and she held my hand. We were freaked and terrified and…just waiting to…finish dying, to get through whatever this transitional stage was. It felt eternal, but Amy never let go of my hand. Your father appeared. He put his arms around both of us and pulled us to the surface. We were right near the car when we came up.

  “I guess it was only a matter of minutes because right after there were ambulances and sirens and fire trucks…all hell broke loose. The EMTs had to strap me down to the gurney. I know now that I was surging, but…who knows what they thought? That I was having a seizure or going into some kind of crazy shock?

  “Your father rode with Amy, of course. Even after my surge stopped, I didn’t know what had happened to me. If I’d made it all up, had some sort of weird near-death experience. Your father came to my room only
once—for a grand total of thirty seconds. He apologized and cried, both of which were goddamn useless. Then, he told me that I could save someone if I needed to, do for another person what he did for me. That’s the only information he gave me, and it didn’t make any sense to me at the time. He left me all alone and in a private hell.

  “I spent the next six months being haunted by that first trip. Tortured by it really. You mix that in with my shitty parents, my shitty life…so I tried to kill myself. For good.”

  I just keep crying and crying. Every word out of his mouth makes my heart splinter further.

  “I took an entire bottle of my mother’s prescription painkillers because I thought that dying was the only way out. But I came back. A week later, I tried slitting my wrists. Then, I drove my car into a brick wall. So, I just kept going and going until I understood that I couldn’t die.

  “I never knew who your father was, and I never wanted to see him again. Even seeing the picture was too much. He destroyed my life—or the little that I had. But it was mine, and he turned me into this.” Costa stands up and walks slowly. He pauses near me before he leaves. “I’m so sorry, Stella, for everything. I didn’t want you to know.”

  I want to scream more, but my throat is constricted and filled with the mayhem of my sorrow, so I couldn’t speak even if I wanted to.

  And I don’t. There’s no place to begin.

  SAM LETS ME CRY until my body is totally spent. I fake being asleep so that he will drift off because I know that he needs to rest and refuel. There’s no chance my mind will settle, and I don’t know how to talk about this, even with Sam. The shock is too strong.

  At four in the morning, Amy’s words from the day of the accident replay in my mind.

  “And what about that other kid? I saw it. That poor kid. I wish we were all dead! What is this?”

  The poor kid was Costa.

  And this is death tripping.

  I’m ashamed that I never thought more about her words after that day, but maybe that denial was part of how I shut down and coped. I didn’t want to know what Amy had meant.

  My father had started this chain of events.

  Everything goes back to him. Without him, Costa wouldn’t have lost his son, Sam wouldn’t have been a death tripper, I wouldn’t have been his power augmenter or a death tripper myself. Amy would have still loved me, and my father would never have abandoned us.

  Of course, Amy and Costa would be dead. There would be no Toby and no sister or father to lose.

  The impact of what he’d done by tripping Amy and Costa must have been too much for my father, and he left us all. That was a huge unforgivable mistake. Not only could he have helped Amy and Costa come to grips with what they are, but he could also have been a wealth of understanding for us all.

  I hate my father, and I love him more than ever. Maybe he didn’t give up on his family. Maybe he gave up on himself.

  I throw on sweatpants and a tee and take my phone into one of the spare bedrooms.

  The call I make rings and rings and eventually goes to voice mail. I call again and again. Finally, my sister answers.

  “What?” she barks groggily.

  “Amy,” I say, “it’s Stella.”

  “Jesus Christ. What do you want?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Screw you. You left. Nobody cares. Don’t call again.”

  I know that she’s about to hang up, so I have to keep her on the line. “I know about Dad.”

  There’s silence. “What do you mean?”

  “I know about Dad, about the car accident…how you…died, how he saved you.” Speaking has never been so hard. “And the other boy. His name is Costa.”

  Amy doesn’t say anything, but I can hear her breathing.

  “I went to Watermark, Maine, to find Sam Bishop. I met him that day in the hospital. He was Costa’s friend. I drove to The Coastal Inn that Sam’s parents own, and I found him. Costa and Sam can do what you can do. They call themselves death trippers.” I pause. “I’m one now, too.”

  Amy finally makes a noise. A gasp or a cry, I’m not sure. But it’s enough to let me know that she’s listening.

  “I know you’re not using and that you’re not suicidal. I know that. When you surface after dying, Sam and Costa call it a surge. That’s the rush we get. It’s how I found you at your condo. I understand everything now, Amy.” I’m getting teary, but it feels good to say some of this out loud. I can hear Amy crying, which I find momentarily reassuring. “Do you know where Dad is?”

  “No, and I’m fucking happy about it. Our mother hired a PI to find him, and that turned up nothing. I hope he’s dead. For real.” Amy’s venom crawls through the phone. “Don’t call me again.” She hangs up.

  The quiet is deafening. I whisper to nobody, “Please come back to me, and be my sister again. I miss you. I need you. You are my only family left.”

  I sit alone in the dark bedroom for a while. Amy is as bitter as Costa is. As we all are. We’re victims of someone else’s power. Tonight, it feels as though there is nothing but heartache and hate in all of us.

  There just has to be beauty somewhere.

  I go downstairs. A light is on in the kitchen, and Costa is sitting on one of the barstools at the island. When he hears my footsteps, he turns and gives me a look of such apology and misery that I immediately fall apart again.

  He looks down. “Stella…”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I stop a few feet from him, my emotions vulnerable and raw. “How could you not? You hate me that much?”

  Costa just shakes his head. “I don’t hate you. Are you crazy? I didn’t tell you because…look at you. Look at what this has done. I didn’t want you to know. What was the point?”

  I wipe my eyes and shoot him a look of disbelief. “The point? So that I could have understood that my sister is not a drug addict who despises me, that my father had a reason for disappearing and leaving me alone with a mother who did nothing but try to destroy me. And I would have understood why you tripped me and turned me into a death tripper. It’s payback for what my father did to you.”

  “It was a stupid reactive thing to do.”

  “What should my father have done? Let you and Amy die?”

  Costa’s eyes flash with anger. “Yes. Exactly. Then, I wouldn’t be living in this hell.”

  Now, I go to him. “Costa…” He spins his stool to me, and I put my hands on his face. “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. You know it. I hate this life, this world, yet I passed it on to you and Sam.” His face is hard, bitter. “If I could die for good, I’d do it this minute.”

  “You didn’t want to be alone.”

  He nods.

  “You’re not alone anymore.”

  “I should be.”

  “But you’re not.”

  I encircle him in my hold, trying to comfort both of us. So much of me resents the hell out of this stupid, broken, selfish boy, but an equally large part of me can now empathize with everything he is. Costa, whether I like it or not, is bonded to my father and to Amy, and he’s therefore bonded to me. My father tripped him, he tripped me…Costa is in my world. He’s part of my fiber, my makeup. It makes sense why he reacted so strongly to my touch when we were under.

  Suddenly, one bit of this circle makes sense to me. After I found Amy in her condo and after she told me to get away from her and Mom, she spoke the same words that Sam had said to me.

  I whisper to Costa now as I hug him, “Go find your good.”

  He actually laughs lightly. “You know about that?”

  “Sam said it to me when I first met him. Then, Amy did years later. You passed it to her, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he says softly. “When we surfaced, before they separated us. Sammy used to say that to me when we were kids…when things were hard for me at home. I don’t know that I ever listened to him though.”

  “You’ll find your good, Costa. You will.”

&nbs
p; “I’m a mess, Stella.”

  “We’re all in this now. None of us chose it, and even though you tripped Sam and me, I get how lonely and angry you were. Maybe I’ll never forgive you entirely, but I understand. I have to. What other choice do I have?”

  His arms tighten around me, and I feel him shake silently in my embrace. “I’m so fucked up. I can’t get a handle on anything.”

  “That’s why you had to tell me the truth. Even though it hurts to know, you needed to let it go, and I needed to hear it. I spent a long time not seeing truths because my mother manipulated so many of my experiences. Knowing that my father started this for all of us? It burns like poison, but the truth lets me see. The truth makes everything clear.”

  I stop as I’m hit with yet another piece of the puzzle—a very significant one.

  Truth. See. Clear.

  Oh my God.

  “Costa…” I start. It’s hard to breathe. “Costa.” There is sudden joy in this tumultuous night.

  He sniffs. “What?”

  I push him from me and look into his sorrowful blue eyes. “Death tripping is very tied to emotions. It’s affected by our moods, our relationships, our minds. Everything, right? All connected, all intertwined.”

  “It seems to be. Where are you going with this?”

  I start to smile as my brain puts it all together. “Listen to me. I didn’t see the truth before. I didn’t have insight.”

  He frowns. “Okay.”

  “Not until I had all the facts, the real story of what happened in the past. Now, I see.”

  Costa starts to smile, too. “You can see. Stella, you can see.”

  I nod and watch as what I’m saying sinks in.

  “And now you can help Sam see.”

  “Yes,” I confirm breathlessly. “I can help Sam see. Literally.”

  In an instant, our destruction turns to hope.

  “It’s so obvious now.” Costa’s cheeks are flushed with excitement. “It makes total sense. God, Stella. This could really work.”

  “It will work. I’m sure.”

  “We can find Toby.”

  “Yes,” I agree. “We can find Toby.”