Lawrence dropped me off at the bus station. As he pulled away, he leaned out his window. “I gotta tell you, those Kools you smoke make rattlesnake venom seem appetizing. You ever stick that stuff in a peace pipe, I’m telling you, man, a war would break out.” He drove off, holding onto a big reckless smile.
As I went to buy my ticket, I realized I had a similar expression on my face, until I was informed I couldn’t take my dog on the bus.
“What? That doesn’t make sense, your logo is a dog.”
“Sorry sir, it’s company policy.”
Yes, I was definitely back in the world.
Snow chased Piddles and me as we hitched eastwards, but we stayed ahead of it until a blast of arctic-chilled, icy rain caught us a few miles north of my parents’ home. It was past midnight, not yet dawn, and, even with new shoes, my feet were soaked and freezing. Any body heat that Piddles, huddled in my knapsack under the furry coat, and I had shared earlier had dissipated long ago. I trudged painfully along the river road.
There, the gods skewered me.
I was keeping my eye on a dim light hovering above a roadside sign to judge my progress. Through the shadows and thick crosswind rain, the sign slowly became more viewable, and with each step, a staggering horror unfolded before me. A pretty blonde woman in a bikini ran carefree on a beach, one foot playfully splashing perfect aquamarine water. Palm trees. Bright sun.
It’s time! Time to fly to the Caribbean!
Smaller shapes, hard to make out at first but part of the image, were set above her.
Another ten steps. Birds came into focus.
I slogged closer. Something eternally ugly and serrated was twisting itself into my chest.
A flock of pelicans. One bird was torn in two. A loose flap of sign material, worn by the years, waved furiously, slapping the top of the woman’s head. Like broken wings.
So many years. She’s been gone so many years by now.
Her bikini was red, streaked irregularly with a slight fading of the poster paper. The effect gave her the appearance of a woman in a garment of flames.
Featherstone Travel Agency.
Three children, all girls, frolicked in the background.
I pictured Cassandra touching herself, just below her belly, before we entered the ruined tunnel. Then with a numbing realization, I thought back to what Bernardo, the drunken story teller at the Santa Paloma restaurant, had said of the feathered woman who had appeared in a great explosion on the beach—she had three daughters. Triplets.
My legs collapsed, my mind buckling along with them. I knelt before the sign with my neck craned upwards. My eyes were pelted by ice; my soul, by the billboard’s penetrating revelation. “Cassandra. No. No. Not you too.”
Chapter 49
I awoke surrounded by warmth. The drawings on the walls were mine. I was in my old bed at my parents’ house. Other than the familiarity of the room, nothing else made much sense as my mind raced with flashes of people and places, gods, and all the strange beings I’d met over the past few years. They demanded my attention, constantly flooding all consciousness. As I made my way around the house over the next few days, my mind couldn’t distinguish the rapid-fire images pulsing through my head from the sounds, people, or shadows around me.
My parents tiptoed and frowned. Whispered and slipped away.
I asked my mother if I had ever left my bedroom or had I grown up there.
“What do you mean, honey?”
“I mean, maybe it’s all been a dream. The gods, the demons, and their plans, y’know?”
She placed a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich in front of me. “After lunch, we’ll go for a walk together. Get some fresh air and exercise.”
I spent time in the workshop, staring at walls, hallucinating full-length movies of everything that had ever been being ripped apart, over and over. Stephanie’s eyes shone with distress when she would come to talk with me until, inevitably, she ran crying from the studio. Piddles always found her, licking away tears until her sobbing subsided.
Thanksgiving came. Uncle Ted and Aunt Maddie seemed to be statues of stone, carved from sadness. Richard had been declared AWOL over a year before, and they had not heard a word from him. The only information about his situation came from a Department of Defense letter that clarified he was not considered killed, wounded, or missing in action. He had deserted, and his last known location was on an airfield in Thailand.
I told them I knew how it felt to not know where their child was.
“How could you know?” Aunt Maddie asked me.
“Three of my children are lost in time, born before I was. At least, that’s what the billboard told me. Crazy mother turned herself into a bird, probably had a nest full of eggs. Another is being raised by, I don’t know, monkeys or reptiles, or war-worshipping fanatics that probably never talked to a god. I mean, really talked, like over a beer. His mother’s a man. I think he’s about one and a half years old. At least he’s in this time realm. But if the immortals grabbed him though, who knows?”
Chapter 50
Delaware River Valley, 1969
What can I say? How to relate what happened next? I moved to another room. My new room reminded me of another. One where a pumpkin-headed nurse had tipped out pills into my hand, and greeted me with “It’s time for your shot” and “The doctor’s going to talk with you today.”
I watched the darkness of my room at night, waiting for Shadow Creature to return. I killed it. A god. I don’t care that it said it was all right. I snuffed out my mentor’s existence.
I listened for instructions to be yelled or whispered from the other doors that lined the hallway. Got any hints now? I jumped. Jumped when I was supposed to. I escaped death time after time. Ha. Time before time. Ha. Ha
There was a lawn outside my chicken-wired window. The glass was too foggy to see through clearly, but I put my ear to it, listening for birds. Listening for them to scream in pain. Nurse Anne, a dark-haired woman with a wonderful smile and an ass that made the world make sense for a brief moment, would tell me that it was winter and the birds didn’t gather on the lawn. She assured me the orange blurry glow of the glass was from the sunset, not a bird on fire.
“There’re some bluejays and cardinals in the trees on the other side of the building.”
“Can you take me there?”
“When the doctor says it’s all right.”
“Do children play there?”
There was something different inside me. The same memories, the same hopes, the same fears, and the same judgements were all there, but the inspiration that held them to the light in my soul was missing. With Shadow Creature gone, my strength, will, and purpose had died. My body deflated when I awoke. No plans existed in my head other than asking for a cigarette. My hand felt dead. If I still had tunnel-sight, it was as opaque as the dull glass in my room. My thoughts skipped from Johnny being blown apart, to me smashing Gus’s teeth out, to Cecilia’s ass wiggling beneath me; from Monkey Man knocking me off a wildly careening motorcycle, to Valentine’s fire burning up the city skyline; or from the taillights of the black Caddie as I sank beneath the cold waters of the Ohio, to Cassandra squawking by a South American stream.
And so much more. All confused, mish-mashed inside me as if I had torn myself up into little pieces that had a life of their own, whose sole purpose was to tear themselves up into yet tinier pieces. I couldn’t stop the thoughts or the emotions that flailed at me. They had free reign and were ripping out my old brain, replacing it with a new one that continuously jammed up any ability to carefully observe and understand events affecting me. My nervous system couldn’t slow down and relax. It was like wrestling Sheoblask throughout eternity, but I was ripping myself apart instead of the time tunnels.
The angelic starlight that had held me in my comforting nest through illness or suffering as a ch
ild had gone out.
Guilt suffused into every fiber of my existence. Kill a god, kill a demon, tell a woman you don’t want her child, send the mother of your triplets back in time, hurt the woman you never stopped loving by betraying her over and over again.
Every memory since I had first heard Doctor Steel’s metallic grinding of a voice taunting me was tainted, no matter how innocent, noble, or loving it might have been at the time it happened. I believed every breath of mine had caused somebody else’s pain. Worries seared away parts of my brain. I convinced myself that the price of observing gods at the beginning of time, before they had ever dreamed of me, was that my soul had been forever trapped in the incomprehensible nothingness before they existed.
I terrorized myself.
It hurt too much to be me. If I couldn’t think without pain, I wanted to sleep. Pills, shots, locked doors became my existence. Nurse Anne would numb eternity for me with her paper cups containing colored pills.
“You seem more relaxed today, Deets.”
“Uh, buh, duh. Wuhter my tongue. Wuhter, I’m going to swallow my tongue.”
“Stop pinching it with your fingers.”
“I have to hold onto it.”
“Here, this will help. Deets, you have to let go of your tongue to drink the water.”
The drugs clouded my body as well as my mind. Sessions with a psychiatrist began on a regular basis. I’d shuffle blindly down the hall, being led by an intern as he steadied me. In bathrobe and slippers, I began to tell stories to Doctor Chambers.
“Good morning, Deets. Let’s see, last session you expressed a concern for the well-being of your children. You say that three girls are trapped in another era and were the founding mothers of a village called Santa Paloma.”
“Yes. Well, maybe. I can’t prove it. It’s just that’s how I read the signs. Their mother became some kind of time traveler and somehow, somewhere had the kids. It would make sense.”
“Why’s that?”
“They worship a bird goddess there. It all fits with the explosion, her feathers, and the time we had sex.”
“And?”
“Doc, I don’t have it in me to jump. I could wreck everything again. I’ll never know them.”
“Tell me what you’d have to do to jump, Deets.”
“Back in time? Go to New York and figure out the puzzle pieces on the portal’s time-jump setup. I never learned how to do that. I repaired it once, but know how to use it? I don’t believe I could. Anyway, I don’t think anyone wants me near it.”
At some point, I began to dress myself. My escort to the doctor’s office no longer needed to hold my arm to guide me.
“Deets, it’s a fine day. The trees are beginning to get leaves on them. After this session, Nurse Anne has invited you for a walk outside.”
“Far out, Doc. That’s cool.”
“How are you feeling today?”
“Like I’m beginning to be able to think again.”
“Yesterday, you were telling me about the time you and Rolly Dixon played guitar together.”
“Yeah.”
“And you showed him the notes to a song that he later recorded?”
“Well, yeah, by mistake.”
“And this song became a best seller from his first album? You also mentioned, that at the time, you didn’t know how to play guitar.”
“Right.”
“Hmm.”
“Yeah, man, but when I learned a few chords, man, we levitated.”
My family visited me once in a while. It was late spring when Stephanie brought Piddles, and we sat together on the hospital grounds overlooking the Delaware River. A crowd of fellow patients gathered, laughing and petting my dog. She romped and nuzzled and rolled over for people to scratch her stomach. Squeals of joy harmonized with rolls of laughter. People’s eyes shone with delight.
Watching their interaction was the first time I felt tears at that hospital.
A few months later, I burst into uncontrollable sobbing for far different reasons.
The overhead fan in the day room was broken on the day the unwanted package arrived. The summer heat was stifling, and I was savoring the menthol of my cigarette as I listened to two fellow patients arguing over how to fix the fan.
“You imbecile, you have to stick a screwdriver right in that hole. There, see it. Right there.” He stretched his finger upwards.
“No sir, I’d use a blaster of some kind. Dynamite.”
“It’s the motor that’s broken. You have to dismantle it.”
“I’m afraid you’re wrong. The air is stuck, not the motor. You fix that and it’ll spin.”
“There’s no air in hell, you moron. Haven’t you noticed? You need a screwdriver or the whole thing’ll fall out of the sky.”
Nurse Anne approached me and rubbed my shoulder gently. I felt the difference in her hand from the other times she had touched me while in her care. It wasn’t to calm me or convince me or to stop me. Compassion for me emanated from her fingers.
“Deets, Doctor Chambers would like to talk to you in his office.”
A small rectangular package sat on my psychiatrist’s desk. Nurse Anne stood by me as I took my usual seat. Chambers explained to me that he had talked with my parents recently. They had delivered some sad news.
“I think you’ve progressed in your therapy enough, Deets, to view this.” He nodded at the brown paper packet, tied with a thin pink bow.
Nurse Anne placed her hand inches behind my neck on the back of the chair. Her motion spoke of support and concern. Ready to catch me, ready to hug me, ready to encourage. I didn’t move. I didn’t know how resilient I was anymore or what emotions could penetrate the layer of fog I had become. I had survived weeks surrounded by venomous jungle snakes, fought off demons and murderers, witnessed the appearance of the first gods, but the box paralyzed me. It linked me to somebody’s nightmare. It would make me remember... someone I cared for.
It was a rare moment, lost to the last seven months, that somebody from my past had reached out to me. The aura of the box was one of love, no matter how devastating it’s contents promised to be. As reluctant as I was to act, I needed to pick up that package, run my hands over the pink ribbon, and deal with feelings other than my own disturbed and confusing pain, even though I feared somebody else’s sad news.
Nurse Anne stiffened when I reached for the container. The doctor tamped on the tobacco in his pipe and watched me slip the ribbon off.
I didn’t recognize the handwriting on a small pink envelope taped to the outside. Female, but not Teresa’s.
Dear Deets,
I’ve missed you so much recently. I write this, barely able to lift the pen. Our family has been suffering through the worst possible tragedy recently. Greg was killed on May 30 while serving his third tour, second as a medic. He was so dedicated to helping the wounded and dying, giving up his plans to study medicine stateside in order to help his fellow soldiers caught in that horror. He told me you had changed him to become a better person. In gratitude, he always wore that carved feather you gave him around his neck. He was wearing it when the helicopter he was in was hit by a rocket and began a downward spiral. We are told he died on impact.
I can’t stop crying.
He is buried in Riverview cemetery.
I’ve enclosed a few photographs of him and thought Greg would want you to have the beautiful stone feather necklace he cherished.
I’m unable to visit with you as I have been living in New Mexico (and I apologize that I didn’t see you when I returned for the funeral), but I wish you happiness. I know with all my heart that you will come out of your latest ordeals stronger. That’s who you are.
I love you forever,
Maureen
The first tear hit the feather where it lay on top of a photo of Greg and me raising our
arms in triumph after we won the state championship game. Number 14 and number 35. I held the game ball for the two interceptions picked off from cousin Richard. Greg told me the next day that, thanks to me, he had gotten laid. If we had lost, she wouldn’t have wanted to celebrate like that. Number 14 was no more.
The second photo showed him in his army uniform, kneeling on one knee, surrounded by clumps of jungle grass. His medic armband looked dirty, his shirt disheveled and flecked with blood, the white feather dangling over the second button. His eyes were worn-out, his posture frail, but he was smiling, and incongruously, an aura of strength surrounded him. His helmet was pushed back, revealing a long scab across his forehead.
I clutched the feather and began to pour out the tears. I looked up at Nurse Anne and said, “With him gone, who’s going to help all those poor, terrified souls.”
Chapter 51
After I started wearing the stone feather, hanging from the same leather thong Greg had used, I began to function as if there was purpose in my life again.
In art therapy, I worked on my first drawings since the tunnel repair ten months before. The mental hospital began to allow me overnight visits to my parents’ house. Walking in the woods with Piddles, I reflected on how it was probably time itself that would quiet the turbulent aftermath of my quest to heal the tunnel.
One night at dinner with my family, I asked if they had any news of Teresa. My mother and father exchanged a look that shriveled any meager expectations or hopes I had.
“What? Have you?”
My mother adjusted her napkin on her lap, cast her eyes downward.
My father took a sip of wine. “Not for awhile.”
“What?” I felt my heart stop pumping.
Stephanie pushed peas around on her plate with a fork. “C’mon, why are we hiding this?” She reached a hand partway across the table towards me. A sympathetic gesture. “Last we heard she had moved to London.”
Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3) Page 33