by Marion Dess
Shorty grasped Winnie’s shoulder. “Good night, Winnie. See you later.” Winnie nodded and gave him a half smile. “Be safe, you two.”
She closed the door behind them and watched them leave in Reagan’s car together. She shut the blinds, and locked the windows. She found her way to the couch, wrapping herself in a blanket Janelle had crocheted for her when Elizabeth had been born. It was a lot like the one that she had just given Elizabeth for her birthday, the one that Shorty had taken to bed with her. It was a cream instead of pink, with light pink satin sewn around the edges. She watched the fireplace, its flames dancing in a comforting rhythm that made Winnie’s eyes heavy. She grabbed a book to pass the time because she hated sleeping without him in their bed. She would much rather fall asleep on the couch with the fire to keep her company. Reagan had always wanted to get her a dog for nights like these, but Winnie wasn’t a dog person.
“What the hell does it mean you’re not a dog person?”
Winnie laughed as she heard Reagan’s voice in her head. She smiled, and curled up on the couch with a pillow beneath her head and the book against her chest. She went to lift it, to open the pages, but her eyes couldn’t focus, so she laid it down beside her on the ground and turned to her side. She closed her eyes, listening to the sound of flames eating away at the logs that gave them life.
A knocking at the door scared Winnie awake. She jumped at first, the way a person does when they’ve started falling asleep but feels as if they’ve been falling through the sky. Then she sat up, and looked around with fogged vision. The clock on the wall read that it was 1:08 in the morning, and she knew Reagan wasn’t home yet because he’d have woken her to take her to their bed. The knocking persisted, but she didn’t feel safe answering it. Nobody was awake at this time of night in their sleepy Ohio town. Reagan worked a town away in Columbus, where there were more crimes and where the state prison was.
She kicked off her shoes and headed to the back of the house, grabbing the phone out of her back pocket. She dialed the precinct number. “Hi, is Detective Keating still there?”
“He left about an hour ago, Mrs. Keating,” the woman on the other line said. “He should be home any minute. Want me to send a squad car from Reynoldsburg to your home?”
“He’ll be home soon. I don’t want to burden anybody. Thank you.” She hung up the phone, and listened to the knocking. Then, a voice.
“Keating. Keating,” it said. He. A man, with a gruff voice, a quiet yet booming voice.
The voice crept under Winnie’s skin, raising goosebumps on the pale flesh. She hugged herself as she made herself down the hallway to Elizabeth’s room, hearing a crash through the front door stained glass. She gasped, her hands flying to her mouth. She could hear Elizabeth’s cries from inside the room, and ran inside, shutting it behind her and locking it.
Elizabeth was wailing in her crib, arms and legs in the air, reaching for Winnie. “Mama!”
“Shh,” she whispered, grabbing her baby. “Mama is here. You’re safe with me, sweetheart.” She held her close, and climbed inside of the closet, closing the door behind her. She knelt and pushed herself and Elizabeth to the back of the closet until she hit the wall. It wasn’t a large closet, but she hid them the best she could.
She listened, rubbing Elizabeth’s back until her cries settled. She held her against her chest and buried her face in her daughter’s short copper hair, smelling her, remembering. She smelt like baby powder and cake frosting. Tears pricked at her eyes, but she promised herself never to cry in front of her daughter. It was a secret promise she’d made when she was just a few weeks old. She had never told anybody, but it was important to her to be strong for her daughter.
She pulled out her phone, texting Reagan. Reagan. Someone is in the house, they broke in. We are in Elizabeth’s closet. Hurry.
Her phone buzzed, Reagan calling. She pressed end. A second later, a text came through from him. Hold him off. I’ll be there in five. I love you. Don’t worry.
I love you.
“What happens when you die?”
Winnie had been asked that question a hundred times before, mostly by children in her ICU. She remembered one particular time, when a 15 year old boy named Kelly (he hated his name, he’d confessed), asked the question. He was mature, he knew he was dying. Winnie didn’t sugar coat things for this kid. She’d known him well, for a long time, and they both knew what was waiting. Winnie sighed. “I’m sure everything is different for everybody,” she’d explained. “Depends on the situation. I think if they were happy when they died, it would be simple. They’d probably go to Heaven without any extra steps. I think that maybe if they weren’t, there might be a moment – a dream – where they would be confronted with what they were afraid of, what they longed for.”
“I think you’re right,” he said, running his hands over his arms. “I think – I hope that I go right there.”
Now, it was clear that Winnie faced the latter.
There was a man at the end of a long hallway, smiling, his arms outreached toward
Winnie. The hallway was blurry, moving even, but she knew that wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be, but it was almost as if she were moving in light-speed because the world was rushing toward her. Except for the man, who she knew was Reagan but his face wasn’t visible. It was dripping, like a canvas splashed with paint. He was standing at the end of the hallway there, melting. She ran toward him, but the hallway extended itself, a moving runway beneath her feet. And then, he was gone, melted into the floor. Left behind was a puddle of mixed colors on the hallway floor.
Then, there was a girl, with red hair, who stepped out from a room at the end of the hallway. She was a teenager, in a bright rose colored dress. Her hair hung to her mid-back in ringlets, but her back was turned to Winnie and she couldn’t see her face. Just as before, she knew that Elizabeth was standing in front of her, a young lady that Winnie didn’t know just yet. The girl Winnie thought to be Elizabeth walked toward the end of the hallway and turned the corner, her hair the last thing that Winnie saw as it flung behind her. Winnie ran after her, this time moving with the hallway instead of being stuck in place. She met with the end of the hallway, stepping around the puddle of Reagan on the floor. She watched as the girl walked down the hallway, and went to follow, but the wall closed up in front of her, sealing completely until a round circle was left in the center and only a hand could reach through. Winnie reached through, and Winnie wanted to yell, to let Elizabeth know she was there, to get her attention. But when she opened her mouth, nothing came out. The wall began to close more and Winnie pulled her hand back, falling back into the now darkness of the hallway. When had that happened? She looked around, then behind her, and it was all dark. Reagan’s puddle was gone, everything was gone. There were no walls, no carpet, no doors or windows. Just darkness, surrounding her until she felt nothing touching her at all except for air.
--
Winnie opened her eyes, inhaling a deep breathe. Her eyes wandered, from the light hanging over her to the tiles on the ceiling. Why were there tiles on the ceiling? The light was blinding and she brought her hands up to cover her eyes. The entire room was tiled, she realized as she followed the tiles down to a stainless steel cabinet with drawers. She narrowed her eyes. This looked familiar, like something everybody knew but had never really seen. She was cold, freezing in fact, and her chest ached. She moved to sit, but quickly realized she was naked underneath a white sheet, and hugged herself. When she sat up, Shorty was sitting in a plastic chair by the door. He was casually reading a book, seemingly waiting. For what, Winnie had no idea.
“What’s going on, Shorty?” Her voice came out as a whisper. “Where are we?” She hugged the sheet closer to her. Reagan would kill Shorty if he were to see her naked.
He stood up. “Hey, Win.”
Winnie shook her head. “Don’t hey Win me. What’s happening?”
“Stay there,” he said, when she went to stand.
“Something happened. Last night.”
“I was shot. Why’m I not in a hospital? This looks like a morgue.” “Winnie.”
“This is a morgue. What the hell?”
“You’re – Winnie. You. You’re dead.” He didn’t stumble over his words often. “I’m breathing, I’m right here with you in this room.”
“My wife sent me,” he said. “She told me to come here, she knew this would happen to you.”
“But your wife is dead,” she said, running her fingertips through her hair. She held the sheet to her breast with her other hand, and felt the raised scar on her chest. That is where she had been shot, she remembered now. “What happened to me?” This was said in a whisper.
He pushed himself up onto the metal table beside her, sitting close to her. “You were shot and killed, last night, by Bruce Miller.” Winnie went to interrupt, but he put his hand up flat to stop her. “I didn’t believe it either, when Elaine told me. I didn’t believe her. But she showed me. She slit her wrists right in front of me, and she fainted after losing all of that blood, but woke up with light scars there that have healed by now. You’re an Immortal. You can’t die.”
Winnie laughed, a defense mechanism she’d been taught by her brothers when she was little. Don’t let people see you hurting, smile and laugh it off. She hated that advice. She wanted to be angry. “You’re telling fairy tales now, Hank?”
“There’s a group of you, people like you, and my wife is the leader. She used to be my wife, that is. She had to leave me, to protect me.”
“I can’t believe you’d lie to me after everything we’ve been through,” Winnie said, standing with teary-eyes. “You’re my friend. How can you lie to me that way?”
He stood in front of her, and held her face to force her to look at him. “I swear to you I’m not lying. I didn’t believe it either.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“I have something else to tell you,” he said. “Here,” he handed her a robe to put on. He hesitated. “You can’t go back to Reagan and Elizabeth.”
She had been looking down at her bare feet, at the beige, overly-clean tiles beneath her, but she looked at him then. “What? What do you mean?”
“There are people who will hurt them and take you if you go back,” he said.
“Oh, really? Then, please explain to me how your wife told you about me?” She stepped backward, distancing herself from him. She crossed her arms over her chest, which still ached underneath the skin. She wasn’t able to wrap her mind around it.
He handed her a group of documents instead of answering her question. She opened them, seeing a death certificate for Winifred Grace Keating. Along with the death certificate, which said her time of death at 1:23 AM and her cause of death which was a gunshot wound to the chest, was a newspaper article from the Columbus Times telling of a cop’s wife who had been murdered by a man her husband had put away. She realized that the news didn’t know his real motive. Her face was plastered in the corner of the article, but she didn’t feel like that woman right now.
“These are real,” she whispered, running her fingers along the edges of them. “They think I’m dead.”
“You are to the world, but if these people, they’re called Trackers, find out you’re alive, they’ll come for you.”
“Why?” She looked up at him. “Why can you see your wife? How are you safe, if nobody else is?”
He pushed his lips together and thought before answering. “She protects me,” he said. “We don’t see each other often, but when we do she comes in secret, in disguises, not as herself.”
“How did she know about me? You said – you said see you later. You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? Why didn’t you try to stop it?”
“Elaine has a system that knows when people will become immortals. A sort of technology. It tracks you like a GPS. I’m not sure how it was created, but it’s a new thing. Within the past year, she said. She came to me yesterday to tell me that you would be in danger, though she didn’t know how. That you were like her. She would only tell me when it would happen.”
“Why’d you leave me, then? Why’d you let Reagan leave me alone with Elizabeth? What if he would’ve hurt Elizabeth?” She started to cry, surprised she hadn’t done so already. “How could you put Eliza in that kind of danger, Hank?” She rarely called him by his real name, but now he didn’t feel like her friend.
He looked down at his boots, running his hand over his face. “I hadn’t thought of that, I hadn’t realized what type of danger you’d be in. If anything would’ve happened to her, god dammit, I’d never forgive myself. I can’t lose another baby like that. I’m…so sorry.”
Winnie stopped, looking at him. “You mean when your wife and daughter were killed, when you told us about that, your wife came back?” she said softly. “She came back?”
“But my daughter didn’t. I had to bury my baby, alone.”
Winnie wiped her face with her sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“That was a long time ago. Now, let’s get out of here,” he said, clearing his throat.
Winnie let him take her to a hotel. He gave her hoodie to hide her identity, and she pulled it over her hair and face. She let him believe that she believed him, for now. She would wait until he left her alone.
He slid the keycard into the slot and let her inside. The room had one full-sized bed and ugly yellow wallpaper.
Winnie winced as the door slammed behind her. “What do I do now?” she asked, playing along.
“Elaine’s got some people in New York. It’s a crowded place. Millions of people in one place, not a soul will suspect you there.”
“I don’t want to leave my home,” she said, looking away from Shorty. “I’ll be here, for them,” he said.
“That doesn’t help me,” she said. She crossed her legs as she sat on the bed, putting her face in her hands. “Why did this happen to me?”
Shorty sat next to her. “This life chooses people. People who have more life to live, people who have unfinished business, people who deserve to keep living.”
“But what if we don’t want to live anymore?” “You’re saying you’d rather be dead?”
“I’d rather be dead than live without Elizabeth and Reagan. Without my mom, my brothers.”
Shorty reached into the bag he’d brought inside with him. “I can send you to New York and have enough money for you to be very comfortable for a long time until you get settled. And here,” he said, pulling out a coat and a blanket.
She looked up at him. “Did you take these from my family?” It was Reagan’s coat and smelled of him, and Elizabeth’s infant blanket that was no longer large enough to cover her.
“I wanted to give you something to remember them by. Apparently it’s what Elaine does when she helps people who are in your situation.”
“My situation,” she said, laughing. She grabbed the blanket and coat and hugged them to her. “My situation. Huh. I don’t think you can even begin to understand.”
Shorty stood and sighed. His phone was buzzing in his pocket. “I have to go. I have to go check on them. But I’ll be back, okay?” He leaned down to meet her at eye level and gripped her shoulder. “Don’t leave this room til I return and help you get to New York, got it?”
She nodded and watched him leave. “Right,” she said. She peered out the window until she watched him leave in his car, and she waited a little longer before leaving herself.
Chapter #1.5
You’ll be okay. We will be right there.
The train was empty, aside from one sleeping man on the opposite side of the car from her, snoring loud enough for it to sound like he was next to Winnie. She pushed herself back into her chair, hugging Elizabeth’s baby blanket to her chest, and closed her eyes. She had a few hours left on the train, and was bored of staring out the window. There was only so much tumbleweed a girl could look at before she
went mad.
The train stopped in Charleston, Pennsylvania. Winnie sat up straight, and looked out the window. There were several people waiting to get on, their tickets being checked and climbing on board before the train lurched forward again, moving toward their location. Winnie watched silently as a woman climbed onto her car and walked the aisle only to sit across from her.
“Mind if I sit here?” She gave a red lipped smile to Winnie.
Winnie shook her head. “Go ahead,” she said, holding the blanket lower in her lap.
The woman pushed her wavy black hair out of her face and smiled at Winnie again. She placed her bag in the seat next to her, instead of in the compartment above. “Ya know, I’m not supposed to keep my bag in a seat. They’re supposed to be reserved in case anybody wants to sit. But I don’t think anybody’ll mind.” She grinned, dimples making big indents in her cheeks. She looked around at the empty train car. “You’ll keep my secret, won’t you?”
Winnie closed her mouth and opened it again. “Sure,” she said. She wasn’t in the mood to talk to anybody, and stared back out the window, away from the woman. Winnie listened to the woman riffling through her bag, and tilted her eyes to look at the woman again. She had a lighter in her hand and a pack of cigarettes. “I don’t think you’re supposed to smoke on the train.”
“Nobody’s here ‘cept us,” she said. Her voice was light and beautiful. Her nose was covered in light freckles. She pressed her lips around a cigarette and slid her finger over the lighter.
Winnie stood and grabbed the blanket. She went to grab her bags out of the compartment above, but the woman cleared her throat. Winnie watched her. “Do you have a problem? I’m just minding my own business and you come over here on this otherwise empty train car to sit with me.”
“No problem here,” she said, drawing in a breath then holding the cigarette between her fingers. She opened the window to the train and dropped her cigarette out.