“We’re going to make it,” he said.
Simon didn’t reply.
TWENTY-NINE
No surprise Tiana had recognized Fishtown: the shops and hotel were built on docks, two strips of buildings that comprised the historical section of the village. Between the docks lay a cove fed by a dammed river. Rachel’s picture had captured the ambience at a quirky angle, her focus on water falling over the dam. The background wasn’t too blurry to pick out the weathered fishing shanties: wood siding, muntins in the windows, dock posts rising high in the picture. She’d crouched for a low angle to give them stark vertical prominence, but this time she was closer to the water than to the prison bars. If that’s what they were.
He was overthinking. She’d captured a moment of beauty. That’s all.
Simon parallel parked along a storefront, leaving the longer lot spaces open to the many vehicles towing boats. Zac checked for an updated post. Nothing yet.
“Let’s split up,” Zac said. “I’ll take the near dock; you take the far one.”
“If I spot her, I’ll call you.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Back here in thirty minutes.”
Zac hustled off, but action didn’t calm him. They were running out of time and highway. Over the next half hour he walked the dock, river and boats to his left and shops to his right. He ducked into places selling jewelry, candles, souvenir shirts, stonework and metalwork and glasswork. He returned the smiles of shopkeepers and managed a sentence or two of small talk, but he couldn’t recall a word he’d said after he left one store for the next. The sun was lowering, shadows stretching away from the lake. This time of year, once dusk fell, it would drop fast. By the time he returned to the rendezvous point, Rachel’s post from this location was almost ninety minutes old.
Simon wasn’t here yet. Zac checked her page. Nothing new and no response to his message, though she had to see it every time she posted.
He gripped a dock post and wasted energy trying to shake it loose. Maddening woman. Why wouldn’t she stop running? He stared down into the rippling cove and tried to plan.
“Hey,” Simon said from behind him.
Zac turned. “She isn’t here.”
“Don’t think so. We could do another sweep, in case one of us missed her.”
He hadn’t missed her. But until she posted again … “Might as well.”
They did. Twenty minutes later the sky was seeping colors toward the lake horizon, orange running down, dark blue trailing behind. Cars started. Headlights swept over the dock and backed away. Stores closed.
Zac returned to the same dock post, and this time Simon was waiting for him.
“Nothing new?”
“Not two minutes ago.” But he checked again anyway.
And his chest closed up.
Rachel had posted a sunset over a beach. He stared a moment at the radiant colors. Then he read the caption. “Old age should burn and rave at close of day.” Or choose not to.
“Oh God.” He gripped the post as his knees threatened to buckle. “No.”
“Zac.”
He couldn’t say more, not to Simon or to God. He thought he could feel his soul in his chest, crying out for Rachel’s life. He handed the phone to Simon, and his hand shook so hard he nearly dropped the phone into the water.
Simon read, swore, and shoved it into his pocket. “Come on.”
Zac followed him, words turning and striking one another inside him like rough stones in a tumbler. None of them would form in his mouth.
Rachel. Believing no one saw the last rays of her as she faded forever from the world. The storm in Zac whipped up and beat down until he could hardly see.
“There’s still a chance,” Simon said as they reached the car. “But it’s getting dim, buddy.”
“I know.”
“All we’ve got left is that she stuck to the route.”
“So we keep driving until we hit the beach.”
Simon was already putting their half plan into action. Already joining traffic on the highway, which had become sparser as they journeyed north.
“Give my phone back,” Zac said.
Simon handed it over with a grunt.
Zac texted Tiana. BEACH PICTURE. ANY CLUE?
In a minute she responded. NOTHING, SORRY. JUST LOOKS LIKE A BEACH.
His thumb hovered over the screen then went ahead and sent his thought. PLEASE PRAY FOR RACHEL.
“Zac, what I said before about being prepared.”
“And what I said before about shutting up.”
“I just don’t want to see you … you know.”
“Well, shoot, Simon. Let’s worry how the suicide of a woman who’s all alone and broken with remorse affects me. Brilliant prioritizing there.”
“You’ve been calling her family.”
“Yeah, so?” But through the inner tempest he glimpsed memories, the ones he did not approach. Ever. “The—the boys?”
Simon glanced away from the road to meet his eyes. Concern rested heavy and dark on his brother. Mournful.
Zac shook his head. “That was different. My boys— It was different.”
“Family’s family to you. And love of heaven, Zac, you latch on so dang hard.”
Not true. Or … was it?
“I don’t get it, but I get it. People are your oxygen, especially close people. But longevite or not, Rachel isn’t close. Might never be.”
He didn’t want to agree. Wasn’t sure he could. He shuddered as the months of the first Life Buoy stirred in his memory, the months after his youngest son was killed in a car accident at fifty-two years old. And two subsequent vigils over him—when his eldest boy was lost to cancer, his middle boy a decade later to old age and Alzheimer’s. To this day Zac’s grief remained a monster, slumbering at the core of him, possessing claws and fangs and fiery breath, still capable of brutalizing him if he crossed near.
His phone buzzed. A text from Tiana. WITHOUT CEASING, FOR YOU TOO.
He pressed the phone to his chest and drew a long breath that stabbed in his side.
“What?” Simon said.
“I asked Tiana to pray.”
“Hmm.”
They drove. Road rolled away, miles added up, minutes ticked toward sunset and then kept ticking. Dusk turned dark. The reinforcement of Tiana’s prayer faded. Zac’s knee began jumping again. He messaged Rachel: PLEASE ANSWER. Beauty was gone from the sky now, from the landscape they passed. All was shadowed.
The road ended.
It had ceased to be a highway at some point and become a two-lane asphalt strip. It terminated in a pull-off complete with drinking fountain, restroom, locking bars for bikes, and of course parking spaces. None of the vehicles was a gray SUV.
Shoulder to shoulder, they struck out for the beach.
“Going to be freezing with that lake wind,” Simon said.
The wind came in harsh off the water, watering Zac’s eyes as they walked into it. At the end of the street, they peered into the night. Other than the streetlight under which they stood, the beach was left to the darkness, but as they cleared the first incline toward the water, orange lights glowed at random to their left and right.
“Fire pits,” Zac said. “Come on.”
As they padded down the beach, Simon’s strides seemed longer than usual. Oh, right— Zac was setting the pace, practically running. The fires flickered against the young night, illuminating hunched backs on the near side of each circle and faces on the far side. Four pits in total, and three of them thronged with noisy, cheery groups. At the fourth, a single figure huddled, back to them, pale hair cascading halfway to her hips.
“There,” Simon said.
Adrenaline surged into Zac’s system. “Stay here for a minute.”
He headed across the sand without taking off his shoes. He might have to chase her, and at this point, hang it all, he wouldn’t hesitate to do so in front of witnesses.
She was crouched close to the flames, feeding them. Sparks popped and
rose into the night to die over her head. Zac approached her from the side, but she didn’t catch sight of him. Beside her lay an accordion file folder. Two more were succumbing to the fire, only seconds ago set atop the kindling wood, writhing and shrinking and falling apart into ashes. Papers within them began to scorch. She threw the stack in her hand onto the rest.
Not rushing her took all his willpower. Instead he called out. “Rachel.”
She grabbed the folder and jumped to her feet. Past the circle of firelight she couldn’t see him. “Zac?”
“It’s me.”
“What are you doing here?” She clasped the folder in her arms.
“Did you take it?” He dropped his voice. The water would magnify echoes. “Rachel, please, the cure, did you take it?”
“Soon.” She spoke the word with the purest grade of hope and relief. “As soon as I’ve finished with my pyre.”
THIRTY
Zac fell to his knees in the sand and stared at the heaps of ashes in the bottom of the pit. She had been burning paper for a while. He gripped his legs and leaned toward the fire as if he could find pages to save.
“Zac?”
“Tell me this isn’t your research.”
“Of course it is.” She reached for another stack of pages.
“Wait.” Zac jumped up between her and the fire.
She startled like a rabbit, didn’t run but began to tremble. He might be trembling too. Her lips pressed into a thin line, her shoulders quivering, Rachel scooped up another stack of pages and held them over the blaze.
“Stop.” Zac’s hand darted for hers. He snatched the pages and held them to his chest. The paper was hot, and a page cracked in his grasp.
A veil fell over her expression. “You changed your mind. You want the cure.”
“No.”
“Then why come?”
“You said soon. That means you didn’t take it yet.”
She held out her hands, fingers spread. “Not yet.”
At his other side, Simon entered his line of vision and crouched close. “You two are attracting attention.”
“Copy that. Rachel, come on.”
Her eyes widened at the sight of Simon. “I don’t know you.”
“Simon. I’m a friend of Zac’s. Born in the nineteenth century.” He smiled.
She drew a ragged breath. “I’m 1901.”
“We need to go,” Simon said.
“My notes must be burned. Well, mine and Doc’s.”
Simon drew a slow breath, exchanged a long glance with Zac. Rachel missed neither.
“Please, Zac, just leave me.”
“So you can kill yourself.”
“I told you I was prepared to pay.”
Zac stepped nearer to her, and a wave struck him—a wave of Rachel’s inner screaming. He nearly staggered.
“Sorry,” he said. “You’re stuck with me.”
Her thin frame shook harder, the tremors violent in her hands, arms, shoulders. “You know I deserve to die.”
There it was. Deserve. That was the loudest of the screams. “No, Rachel.” She stood there. Shaking. Holding on to the accordion folder stuffed with papers. Simon and Zac tossed sand onto the fire, and she made no move. When it had smothered enough to leave it, Zac touched her elbow. She jolted though he had been standing in her line of sight the whole time.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, and the wave that drenched him now was sharp animal terror.
He lifted his hands. “Okay. But we’re leaving now. All of us. Where did you park?”
“Up the beach.” She pointed. “A cottage there.”
Zac motioned her in front of them. “Lead the way.”
She kept distant by more than an arm’s length as they padded up the beach a few hundred feet, then climbed a slope of sand and walked down a sand-and-gravel pathway to a cluster of cottages, old but maintained. Hers was sea blue with white shutters, one room. She dug a key from her pocket and let them inside.
“I had planned to die at Florence’s. The bed-and-breakfast—did you look for me there?”
Zac nodded.
“But I couldn’t let her find me in her own house. She’d never get over that. A cottage for rent isn’t so personal. I’m sorry mortals will have to find me at all, but it’s unavoidable.”
“Rachel,” Zac said.
She looked from him to Simon. “Restitution, is that it? I’ll be dead by sometime tomorrow. Is there something additional you require?”
“Will you listen to me? I came to keep you from doing this.”
She seemed to absorb his words with effort despite the fact he’d already said them. She looked past him at Simon, who was standing against the door, silent.
“Why did you come?” she said.
“Because he’s not up to driving after that fall yesterday.”
Zac was fine to drive, and Simon knew it, but in case we had to cover up your suicide was hardly something to say to her.
“Zac? You’re hurt?”
“A little,” he said.
“It didn’t look like too much weight on you. I thought you’d be able to dig yourself out.”
“I’m mostly fine.”
“Oh. Good.” Confusion creased between her eyes.
“But you wouldn’t have been, if we hadn’t come in time.”
“I thought about leaving a note for the mortals, telling them I was much older than any of them, and this wasn’t suicide, just natural death. But it wouldn’t have made sense to them. Do you disagree?”
“I disagree with your whole plan, and I’ll keep repeating myself until it sinks in.”
She grabbed hold of the ends of her hair in both fists. “Don’t be ridiculous. No matter what else happened, I was always going to leave one dose of the cure intact, for myself.”
“For a natural life span, not death in a day.”
“And then I killed four people. Changed the moral equation.”
“Rachel. Where is it?”
She thrust her hand inside the folder and withdrew a collection of tiny vials. Three of unidentified liquid and two that had to be …
“That’s blood,” Simon said.
Rachel nodded.
The blood was labeled. One with a J, the other with an A. The other vials must contain the cure. Zac held out his hand.
Her hand closed around the vials. “You have to respect my choice, Zac.”
“When your choice is to murder yourself, no, I don’t.”
She backed into the corner where a low metal table stood and placed the vials in a row. She took a step away from the table. It seemed an effort.
“Happy?” she said.
“Not the word I’d use,” Zac said. She needed a distraction from those things before she tried to bolt with them. He picked up the folder and peeked inside. “It’s all handwritten.”
“I didn’t do anything on computers. I recopied sometimes, just in case papers were damaged somehow.”
“So this is your research to correct the cure? To make it what it’s supposed to be?”
“I’d have to look at what’s left. I wasn’t paying attention, I was just burning it all.”
David’s hope, a pyre on the beach. Zac sank onto the daybed in one corner and dropped the folder next to him. He sagged.
“I don’t understand,” Rachel said. “You told me you don’t want the cure.”
When Zac didn’t answer, Simon said, “He doesn’t.”
“Do you?”
“No, but another of us asked that we preserve your research and bring it back to him.”
“And that’s why you came.”
Zac gripped the side of the mattress in both hands. “No. If you had no research to share, I still would have come.”
“For me,” she whispered.
“We want you to live. I’m not sure how many more ways I can say it.”
“You want me to live,” she whispered. “Me.”
“Yes, you.”
Standing in the mid
dle of the single-room cottage, in the middle of the braided rug, Rachel wrapped her arms around her middle and gave a long moan. The sound fell from her like a morning rain, rose like a soft mist. The sound rinsed the room in penitence, in disbelief, in loneliness.
Zac went to her. He placed his palm on her shoulder.
“I can’t be touched,” she said, the words more like a cry.
“Why not?”
“Because no one touches me.”
She didn’t try to evade him though. She stood still. He stepped closer, and she shuddered, but he wasn’t holding her there. She could have moved, made distance. She didn’t.
He’d broken his spiritual silence last night. Now for the next step. He prayed for help, for wisdom.
It might be wrong; it might heighten her anxiety; but he thought it would be right. He hugged her. Her arms continued to clasp her middle, and another moan came from her, this one drenched in fear. He closed his eyes and prayed, this time for her. Slowly Rachel’s arms loosened and fell to her sides. She leaned her head on Zac’s chest.
“See, Rachel,” Zac whispered. “You can be hugged.”
“This isn’t how the night was supposed to go.” Her voice came as quietly as his, siblings telling secrets into each other’s ears.
“You’re supposed to live, kiddo,” he said.
“I don’t think that’s right.”
“I know. That’s why I came.”
“For me.”
“Yep. Just for you.”
She raised her arms inch by inch and touched his back with a graze of fingers, as if he might prove to be a phantom. Then she returned the hug so tightly his ribs gave stabbing protest. He bit his lip and kept quiet.
After a minute he guided her to the daybed and pushed her shoulder down until she sat. He sat beside her, and the years of Rachel’s despair wrought their ache in him. The room had been small; now it was shrinking. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and let her lean on him.
A look passed between him and Simon: No talking yet. Let’s give her a minute. Rachel was silent. Not even her breathing made a sound. She slouched against Zac as if she might fall asleep with her head on his shoulder.
Minutes passed. Ambient sounds filled the time as Zac became aware of each: first the ticking clock on the far wall, then the leaves in the cottonwoods outside the door, then the far-off swishing rhythm of Lake Michigan’s waves. He focused on that rhythm and tried to let it lull him, let it wash Rachel’s fear and dejection from his spirit, let it convince his brain he was sitting on the beach under a blue sky canopy.
From Sky to Sky Page 23