Told you so.
It is a cool book. Head and heart together is how I think of great books. You think and feel. This one makes you want to speak for someone who can’t. At least it does that to me. And I got you liking Frost too, huh? Bonus level unlocked.
About your serious question.
He read the email again, and a knot formed in his stomach. Lucas was eleven years old, for crying out loud. Zac’s most devoted fan. The kid could have gone anywhere in the world, and he asked the Make-A-Wish Foundation if he could meet Zac Wilson the stunt guy. He’d faced death more times than Zac had, and he had the careful thoughts and somber eyes that came with such experience. Zac couldn’t give the kid a mask. He shut his eyes and searched for a middle ground.
I don’t know if anyone can be completely ready.
As the words came from his fingers, he pictured David. If anyone could be ready to meet God face-to-face, it had to be this guy who had walked with Him for a hundred-plus years. But even David had Tiana. Leaving her for blissful eternity would rip the man’s will down the center, temporariness of the separation notwithstanding.
People are pretty much never ready for the unknown, and you can’t get more unknown than death. But you didn’t ask about people in general; you asked about me.
He swallowed hard. He tapped the keys without pressing them, stared across the little apartment through the window at the night silhouette of the lone apple tree someone had seen fit to plant in the front yard. Probably without realizing they were sentencing the maintenance crew to a lifetime of picking up rotting apples every fall.
If I’m honest I have to say no. I wasn’t ready. Not even in the ways I could have been. And yes, I had time to know it. As for how I felt when I realized I wasn’t dead after all,
His fingers froze. A shiver traced his neck. He set the laptop aside, walked across the room to the window, and stared at the clouds past the apple tree. For a full minute he didn’t move.
How it felt to survive. To know you always would.
He wandered back to the couch and the laptop. He set his fingers on the keys.
it was mostly disbelief. Then I guess it was some confusion and some gratitude.
He stared at the last word. It should be true. It might be. But it didn’t feel true.
He left the word there because he couldn’t tell any mortal, much less an eleven-year-old, the whole truth. The certainty that he should have been dead this time, finally, irrevocably dead. The throb of guilt that he wasn’t, though he’d already lived more years than anyone deserved. The fear that sent ice creeping up his arms and legs as he surveyed the remains—his remains. His clothes mostly gone, and what looked like blood but was already dry, as if it had come from someone else, sometime in the past. And then the awareness. This wasn’t luck, wasn’t the serum.
When he had asked a hundred years ago, God hadn’t spared him. Now, without his asking, God had.
He had thought about praying, there in the canyon surrounded by rock older than he was. He had stared at the blue sky above, squinted at the sun for a second or two, watched the clouds drifting past him above and their shadows drifting over the earth at his feet. Beauty from God’s hand. Yet Zac couldn’t manage one word to Him.
I don’t know what else to tell you, Lucas. It’s a hard question. If you want to ask more about it, you can. I don’t mind, even if I don’t have the answer.
Zac
P.S. That depends. What kind of book do you want?
SIX
He flailed his way to consciousness with the weight of a behemoth on his chest. Pushed up in bed, but the weight bent him forward. His knees pulled in as his energy funneled to the single goal of drawing a full breath. He wanted to call out for help. Please, anyone. But there was no one to call out to. He knew that much.
He buried his face against his knees. Dark in the room, no whisper of dawn, a night-light down the hall that had done exactly nothing to ward off the dream. Never did. He shook like a child. Or perhaps like a man whose mouth and throat and lungs once filled with death while his body could not die. The dream grabbed hold again, a hawk and Zac the field mouse, crushed by a muscled foot, torn by talons and beak. His body rocked in place on the bed. He tried to breathe.
Please. Help.
The phone was in his hand before he knew he’d reached for it. Contacts. S. He stared at the screen. He knew what the voice mail would say if he called. Not that he ever did these days.
“Leave a message if you want.”
Long minutes. Short breaths.
He cradled the phone. Work through it. Not the first time. Not the last. Talk. Words helped.
His first attempt sounded more like a sob. Simon would have something to say about that.
“Yeah,” Zac said. “I do this to myself. Idiot. Get it together.”
The screen darkened, and the disappearance of Simon’s name increased the pressure on Zac’s chest. He tapped his finger to bring the light back, and his lungs opened a little.
“Sorry.” He spoke between breaths. “To bug you. Like this. Throw some snark at me. If you want. I’m listening.”
No sound in the room but his cursed gasping.
“This is stupid.” But he couldn’t put the phone down, not while needles pricked his fingers and palms and his ribs seemed to be shrinking.
Stupid. An inconvenience to friends. Moira had told him so after years of shouldering this weakness alongside him. She’d finally been honest with him. Honest about this and lying about everything else.
Zac curled his fingers around the phone and rested his forehead against the back of his hand. He worked for more breaths. They entered his lungs like shards of glass. He curled his free hand into the bedsheets. He tried to cast his mind back to nights like this one, deepest trenches of night, when he had called and Simon had answered and recognized Zac’s terror audible across miles. Simon stayed on the line making small talk until Zac could breathe again and never asked questions, though the interrogator in him had to be salivating for an explanation.
Zac’s next breath came easier, more sandpaper than ground glass. The attack could last only so long. He uncurled to an upright position and stretched out his legs. Cold sweat soaked through his shirt at the chest, armpits, and back. He sat a few more minutes breathing. Then he stripped off the shirt and tossed it onto the floor and shivered, though the room was warm. His hands were like ice, but the tingling in his fingers was lessening.
“Okay,” he said. This time when the phone went dark, he tossed it onto the bed. “I’m okay. Thanks, man.”
Crying out loud, if Simon knew he did this …
In silence Zac got out of bed and threw on a clean tee. He pushed his bare feet into his running shoes, locked his apartment, and walked out into the floodlit parking lot. The waking birds were his companions as he paced the full length of the lot beneath a sky that turned gray at the edges. Paced and breathed. Eventually, around five, he hit his last lap. He’d worked the panic out of him. He could stop moving.
He halted under the canopy of the old maple tree, its leaves half yellow, half shed. He leaned his shoulder against its trunk and then rested his head too.
Another night exactly like the last twenty.
Purging Colm’s apartment hadn’t purged Zac’s brain. That was annoying. And, well, a little unnerving. Something was still wrong with him.
Zac pushed his palm against the bark. Looked up into the branches that bobbed in the almost ceaseless lake wind. Through their rugged pattern the sky was turning pink. No telling why he loved this tree so much. Maybe because it was the oldest in the lot. It seemed to watch over him, mute witness to his struggles out here in the nights since Colm’s death. An inane fancy, but a comforting one.
Okay, enough. Five in the morning, a good hour of the day. Past time to get on with it. He returned up the walk to his front door and let himself inside. As the door shut and the walls surrounded him, as the ceiling blocked the sky, his throat and lungs tried to close agai
n, but the reaction washed over him without soaking in, receded instead.
He entered his unit, threw on some running clothes, and stepped outside again, into the bracing chill. He’d be sweating soon enough.
His five-mile run circled the town of Harbor Vale twice: shops and neighborhoods, hushed and drowsy, gray light turning to pink and then yellow as the sun rose. As he ran, he wondered what continent Moira slept on right now, if indeed she slept. She might be awake purely due to her time zone. She might be only an hour or two different from his but awake anyway. Painting maybe. Fingers brushed with yellow and blue, her favorites. Hair pulled back messily.
The image made him ache. Did she sleep as poorly as he did? Did she dream Colm back to life with blood on his hands?
After the run, he did some weight training with a cheap set he’d bought at a department store in Traverse City, since Harbor Vale didn’t have a gym. He showered off the good sweat of his workout and the cold sweat of his panic. He grabbed his wallet and keys and left the apartment. It was too small.
The drive to David’s was more automatic than conscious decision. When Zac drove up, he was kneeling in his backyard under the oak tree, arms folded against the chill of the morning, head bowed. Praying.
Zac hunched against his car door. He pictured himself, scant hours before, grappling under the other tree. David might be grappling too, but he addressed the One who made the trees. When he rose, Zac approached with a loose stride, a swing to his arms that bespoke casual ease.
“Morning,” David said.
“Best time of the day.”
“Aye.”
The K-car was still in the driveway. Navy blue in daylight, Missouri plates. Zac nodded at it. “No hotel yet, I see.”
“Cady says that’s not necessary.”
“Oh, she does, does she? And what are your thoughts on that?”
“They’re preparing to drive home.”
Leaving. Just like that. “How’s Finn?”
David shrugged. Really, he hadn’t asked? Some host. Zac shook his head and headed inside.
Cady sat at the kitchen table eating cold cereal, her hair escaped from its braid in every direction. Sunlight fell on her through the bay window and deepened the shade of her hair to something like raw honey. She spooned a bite of cereal with a young steady hand, one that bore no age spots but, he could see now, was spattered with freckles. Like the wrist. Probably like the arm hidden by the sleeve of her hoodie. Like …
She lifted her head, and her eyes met his. Clear today. Bright. And so green he was reminded of a shed door he’d painted that color sometime in the 1950s.
“Hello,” she said, her voice almost soprano. She tilted him a smile, freckles like confetti on her cheeks, nose, and forehead.
“Hi.” He smiled as he sat across from her. Far be it from Zac Wilson to lose his words around a lovely woman. Now that her skin had lost its age, that loveliness was easy to appreciate.
She was still looking at him, spoon halfway to her mouth, dripping milk into the bowl. Her cheeks warmed to pink.
“David says you’re leaving,” he said.
She took her bite of cereal and swallowed before she answered. “Still nothing from Anna and James. I have zero experience with missing persons, but I’m about to learn.”
She didn’t mean a report to the authorities, not when they might have aged eighty years in eight days. “Where’ll you start looking?”
“After their usual places? I have no idea.”
“I’ll help if I can. And once we find them, you can all come up here to visit.”
She took a few more bites. “To visit, of course. You don’t have to worry about overpopulation.”
“David said something to you.” The misanthrope. Zac planted both hands on the table. “Well, he doesn’t own Harbor Vale.”
“So far he’s said ‘Good morning’ and ‘You seem well’ and ‘Please feel free to eat any yield of the cupboards.’ He slept in the tent out there”—she gestured to the door that opened onto the deck— “and I think he came inside only to make sure we were okay. Then he went back out again.”
Providing for those in need, yet avoiding unexpected company. Predictable. The man could close his bookstore and spend a year walking up and down the aisles, as happy among his books as most people were among, well, people.
Zac sat back in his chair. “He actually said ‘yield of the cupboards’? Of course he did. I can hear him saying it.”
Cady grinned, but it faded. “He’s settled here. We wouldn’t interfere with that. It’s not about ownership; it’s about respecting boundaries.”
“And if I ask you to stay? I mean, I’m living here too.”
“This isn’t your home, Zac.”
He looked away, then met her eyes again. “That’s what I keep telling myself, but I’m still here.”
“You came less than a month ago. I’d hardly call that permanence. And Finn told me someone died here. The memories can’t be easy.”
Zac scrubbed a hand through his hair. “No.”
“David’s home, David’s boundary, if he chooses to draw it. Though I appreciate your invitation.”
Movement at the open entry to the kitchen drew her gaze as well as Zac’s. Finn stood staring at her, rumpled with bloodshot eyes, but the strain was gone from his mouth. A deep breath rose in his chest.
“Cade.”
She rose. “On the mend, just like I told you.”
Before she’d finished her sentence, Finn was halfway across the room. They engulfed each other in a hug, his hand cupping the back of her neck, her arms squeezing him around the ribs.
“I’m okay, Finn.”
“Thank God.”
“Sorry I scared you.”
“Just—the timing.”
“I know.” She squeezed once more and then they both let go.
They hadn’t kissed.
Cady ran her palms over her messy braid. As if only now noticing him, Finn locked eyes with Zac.
“Hey,” Zac said.
“I owe you an apology. Or more than one.”
“We’re good, man.”
“No. I was … I’ve been … ready for war.” He grimaced. “And yesterday was a bad day.”
Zac stood and offered his hand. Finn gave a half squint that seemed to be his version of raised eyebrows, hesitated another moment, and then clasped Zac’s hand with a firm grip.
“Let’s start over.” Zac shook his hand. “Zac Wilson, born 1855, stopped aging thanks to a mystery serum in 1887.”
The man smiled for the first time in Zac’s presence. “Timothy Finn. Born 1863, aged until 1891.”
“Young whippersnapper.” Zac grinned. “Timothy, huh?”
“Don’t use it,” he said without a hint of levity.
Zac pointed at Cady. “Next.”
“Cady Schuster. I was born in ’70 and stopped aging in ’96.”
Physically, those dates made her six years younger than he was—even more negligible for them than for mortals—but his mind didn’t stop at math. He mentally replaced her hoodie and jeans with a slim-waisted dress of pale green that accented her eyes. Her fuzzy yellow house socks became dark stockings, and— He halted the picture of the rest of her wardrobe, the pieces he couldn’t see. Okay, he tried to halt it.
Time to say something, help himself out. Ages. Right.
“David was—changed, turned? Whatever word I use, we sound like vampires. Anyway, he was the first of us.”
“Our first was James,” Cady said.
Footsteps sounded from the hall, and David stopped just outside their gathering. His eyes warmed, though his posture still held a wire-fine tension.
“Even among ye, I’m ancient,” he said, the vowels lilting with his true accent. “1848 here.”
“This old man”—Zac jabbed his finger at him—“served in the War between the States.”
“Oh my.” Cady’s eyes widened. “You could be my father.”
He crossed his arms. �
��We’ll measure the gap in physical age, not calendar age. So I’m thirty-five and no one’s ancestor.”
“Seems fair,” she said, not bothering to squelch her smile.
“I disagree.” Zac sat back down and propped his feet on the chair opposite. “If we’re only as old as we act, you could be our great-great-grandfather, man.”
A gentle laugh chimed from Cady, but Finn didn’t crack a smile. Zac must be off his court-jester game.
Before David could offer a retort, Finn took a step toward him, face still bland as candle wax. Zac would have to learn the tells that worked in place of facial expressions.
Finn offered his hand to David as he had to Zac. “I’ve wronged you. Attacked you without cause. Thought you murdered not just that man but my family too. I had no right to come here again.”
“You came to save her life,” David said, arms still crossed.
Finn did not lower his hand. “Yes.”
“Fear drove you.”
“Yes.”
David nodded and grasped Finn’s hand. “We’ll speak of it no more.”
Only as the man’s shoulders relaxed did Zac realize the tension that had gripped Finn. He shook David’s hand. “Thank you.”
“Aye.”
“So, David,” Cady said, “you were given a mystery serum too?”
“Just so,” he said. “I wasn’t conscious, and after recovering I returned to my home in another town. Not until last month did I meet the others.”
“Last month—of this year?”
“Indeed.”
“Oh, how terribly lonely.”
He smiled. “No longer.”
“We had a file on him,” Zac said, “left behind by our doctor. We knew he was out there in the world.”
“A doctor who treated you for something mortal, right?” Cady said. “I tore my arm on some barbed wire and developed an infection.”
“Same here. We should compare notes. See how similar we are biologically, how similar our stories are.”
“Do you think that might help us understand what happened to Holly and Sean?”
He hadn’t been thinking of Holly and Sean, only of knowing the stories of the two in front of him. “It’s worth a try.”
From Sky to Sky Page 6