by Vin Carver
Laughter escaped Cameron. He dropped his head, hid his face in his arms, and twisted his upper body back and forth. He forced his laughter into a sob, hoping the priest would fall for it. “My parents don’t want me.”
“There are times when it may seem like parents don’t want their children, but by the will of God, they do. They want you Cameron, they just don’t know how to show you. Do your parent’s go to church?”
“You don’t understand, Father.” Cameron raised his head. “They really don’t want me.”
“How do you know this, my son?”
A fire ignited and burned deep inside Cameron. He sucked in his thin cheeks and straightened his eyebrows. “I know because they chose to let me die.”
Father Sardino attempted a smile. Lines in his forehead creased and relaxed. He tried to smile again, and it came. “I see Cameron. At your age, it’s common to feel like your parent’s have abandoned you, like they have chosen to let you die. It’s also common for you to reach out for something else, for something to fill that emptiness. I apologize, but I have to ask, have you been taking drugs to fill the emptiness?”
Yes, you moron, that’s why I’ve been shivering this whole time. I thought you’d never catch on. Cameron faked another shiver.
Father Sardino said, “It does not matter to me if you are on drugs, my son. I cast no stones. I have helped many young people battle the sins of addiction. My congregation in Chicago consisted of people who, with the help of God, recovered from these sins. As a shepherd of God, I turn no one away. I can help you. Do you want my help?”
“I can’t stop…” Cameron summoned for tears to flow and buried his face in his hands. The tears didn’t come, but they didn’t need to, he had this covered. He dug through his memories searching for the right words. He had memories of voices without faces. Some sounded like his dad, and some sounded like rock-n-roll. “I never wanted a life like this. I just wanted to have fun. I used to do just a little, but the little wasn’t enough, so I started doing more and more. Now I can’t stop.”
Cameron lifted his head. He had managed to squeeze out a single tear, and it ran down his cheek. “I bet you didn’t think you’d run into a drug addict out here in nowhere Tamarack, did you?”
Father Sardino’s eyebrows pulled together for less than a second, and Cameron got his answer.
“While I am aware that sin in all its forms doesn't care from where it breathes, I had hoped Tamarack would be less…” Father Sardino wiped his forehead. “Less dangerous.”
“Father, do you think I could have something to drink?”
“Of course, my son.” Father Sardino stood up and his belly hit the desk, shoving it into Cameron. “I’m sorry, my son. I need a larger office.” He put his hand on Cameron’s shoulder as he walked toward the hall. “Allow me a few moments, and I will return with a glass of water and a wet towel for your neck.”
Father Sardino’s thick hips wagged through the office doorway and into the hall. Cameron kept his back to the door and waited. He heard one of the doors to the nave whoosh open and then shut with a k-chunnng. He walked around the desk, sat on the distressed office chair, and opened the bottom drawer. It held a bible, a chalice, and a bottle of wine, but no golden box. He slammed it shut. The only other drawer was too small to hold the golden box, but he opened it anyway. He found a stack of photos and took them out.
The first few photos had been taken at a football game. Boring. He flipped to the middle of the stack and found one of a quaint house. The priest stood next to the house smiling and waving. He thumbed through the rest and saw nothing of interest. When he put the photos back in the drawer, he found a stack of papers held together by a black binder clip. Cameron took the clip off and picked up the top page. The heading read COMMERCIAL INSURANCE POLICY. He flipped through the pages and found another stack of photos. Unlike the others, these photos were interesting. Someone had taken dozens of pictures of the chapel, inside and out.
Footsteps came from the nave.
Cameron spread the photos out on the desk. All the way to his left, he found one of the golden box. The box sat on a wooden shelf with nothing else around it.
One of the nave doors whooshed open. Cameron lifted his head up from the priest’s desk. Father Sardino stepped into the hall, and the door closed with a k-chunnng.
“I’ve come with a glass of—” Father Sardino peered into the office, and his eyes flew open. He held a glass of water and had a towel draped over his arm like a butler. “Cameron, my son, what are you doing?”
Cameron picked up the photo and walked into the hall. He held it up in front of the priest’s face. “Where is this box?”
“My son, why would you—”
Cameron mashed the photo against Father Sardino’s fat face. “Where is it?”
The glass of water hit the floor, and Father Sardino pushed Cameron on top of it. The priest’s face bubbled red. His feet stuttered up and down, and his belly jiggled.
Cameron got up and thrust the photo at the priest again. “Last chance fat man, where is this?”
“You’re on drugs.” Father Sardino stepped back and put his hands up to his face. “Not again. This isn’t happening again.” He flung the door to the nave open and ran inside. A wide swath of red carpet ran down an aisle and ended at the steps to the sanctuary. Father Sardino’s feet pounded past the pews, and Cameron chased after him. Despite his girth, Father Sardino ascended the steps to the sanctuary like a gymnast. He turned left, reached for the pulpit, and—
Crunch.
The priest’s foot bent up to the side until his heel touched his calf. He fell to the floor with a massive k-flump, and Cameron leapt over him.
Cameron ran his eyes from the priest to the pulpit. “So, Father. What’s in your little stand here?”
“Stop. Stay out of there.”
Cameron walked behind the pulpit. The golden box sat on a shelf just as it had in the photo. He opened it and grinned at the black, 9mm handgun.
Father Sardino pushed against the floor and raised himself up. His wrists turned white, his elbows shook, and he fell back down.
Cameron took the gun out of the box and pointed it at the priest’s head. “Close your eyes.”
“Not again. Please no. Not again.” Father Sardino rolled onto his back, put his palms together, and closed his eyes. Sweat ran off the sides of his face.
“Just stay there, fat man.” Cameron walked down the steps to the first pew. “Keep your eyes closed, and I might let you live.”
The priest scrunched his eyes tight. Invisible words shot from his mouth, his lips opening and closing in jerky, successive movements.
“That’s it.” Cameron sat on the pew. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. I’m sure God will save you.” He put the gun on the floor and laid on his side. He closed his eyes, and everything went black, then red. His body became as rigid as the pew. Billowy red sheets wrapped around him before breaking into black cracks of emptiness and reforming. A rectangular, faceless face, outlined in black, floated in front of Cameron’s consciousness.
Cameron spoke without speaking. “You know why I have come.”
“Before you arrived, we sought the answer to your question, and the answer sought us.” Red murk moved liquid inside the face’s rectangular black border. “This priest is aberrant, but he does not block the restoration. We do not need his removal. His congregation in Chicago is still in the one true line of time, and the true him is with them. We can collapse this line of time with or without his removal. Lysos will succeed.”
A second faceless face floated across the billowing backdrop and spoke without speaking. “Our success does not depend on the removal of this priest, but if his removal aids in the restoration, then remove him.”
Cameron nodded without nodding, the faces faded, and the black borders broke and blew away. The billowing sheets swirled in on themselves and vanished. Cameron’s body pulled into the fetal position, then straightened. He sat up and swung his
feet to the floor, kicking Father Sardino’s outstretched arm.
The priest had crawled down the steps and was reaching for the gun.
Cameron, with the calm of a Buddhist monk, bent over and picked up the gun. He pressed the barrel against the priest’s forehead. “For the record, I’ve never taken drugs, and I don’t feel abandoned by my parents, I was abandoned. They chose to let me die of cancer, and they’re going to pay for it. Too bad you won’t be around to speak at their funeral.”
BANG
Father Sardino’s head bounced off the edge of the pew and hit the floor. A tendril of smoke rose out of the hole made by the bullet and drifted into the rafters. Multicolored rays of light reflected off the smoke, and a deep calm washed over Cameron. He shoved the gun into the back of his jeans and covered it with his shirt.
Outside, Cameron stretched his arms to the sky and tipped his head back. The sun felt warm on his pale, dead skin.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
You'll Get a Stigma
Warren stepped over a mud puddle and disappeared into the trees of Lake Forest. Hellhole Cameron had been right. Warren didn’t want anyone to see him here. Most days, Warren didn’t want anyone to see him anywhere. Hellhole Cameron’s Tamarack seemed a lot like Warren’s, but that didn’t mean he should chance getting spotted. Since the forest fire, he couldn’t chance getting spotted anywhere, except maybe in Nirvana. Everything there was perfect—the way it was supposed to be.
A trickle of thoughts pushed into a flood of questions, and terror washed over Warren’s brain. Until now, he hadn’t had time to think about the urn. The urn had taken him to two Hellholes. Could it take him to five? To ten? To one hundred? What if from now on, he visited a different Hellhole every time the urn crackled and popped? What if he never returned to Nirvana? The plan wouldn’t work. More terror hit him. He might get stuck in a worse Hellhole than this one—a Hellhole of Hellhole’s. Was getting stuck a possibility? Would the urn run out of fuel and stop working altogether? What did it run on, lightning?
Warren’s head throbbed. He pressed his fingers against the pulsating veins in his temples and closed his eyes. He smelled smoke and pulled his hoodie onto his head. Midway between the culvert and his trails—Little Dip and Rotted Wood—he sat on the ground. Burning questions filled his brain, and he doused them with the sprays of hope that Hellhole Cameron had given him. He unzipped his backpack and held the urn in his hands. Cameron’s crisscross plan, Warren’s future…everything—it all depended on the urn.
He sat with his legs crossed, and his butt on a mound of clay. Through the trees in front of him, Acorn Row ran down the hill to his house. He traced the gold inlay of the urn with the tip of his index finger. The glaze made the edges between the blue ceramic and the inlay undetectable, but he tried to feel them anyway. His finger touched the edge of the lid, and he stopped. A chill ran into his finger and up his arm. Last time the urn chilled his arm, it had sent him to the wrong Hellhole. A new fire of burning questions ignited in the back of his brain. He didn't trust the urn, but he had to do something.
He took a deep breath, pressed his fingernail in between the urn and the lid, and flicked the lid into the air. It landed on his thigh and—
Nothing happened.
A maniacal laugh escaped him. Maybe the urn had run out of whatever it needed to work. Now it was just a piece of metal and ceramic, nothing more than a modest receptacle. He laughed again. His laughing turned into crying. The urn wasn’t just a modest receptacle, it was Cameron. Not Hellhole Cameron, or Nirvana Cameron, but the Cameron that had sat on the mantle and lived in Warren’s imagination. Warren tossed the urn back and forth. The lid fell off his thigh and tumbled onto the ground.
As a child, whenever Cameron had come up in conversation, one—or both—of Warren’s parents would glance at the mantle, and change the subject. Warren used to introduce the urn to his friends as his brother. That freaked everyone out. To Warren, Cameron was real, he just couldn’t play because he was trapped in the urn like a genie. The notion that Cameron lived in the urn more than freaked out Warren’s mom. She had told Warren to get a new imaginary friend. When he had asked her why, she’d said, “No one knows what to say when they find out a member of your family has died. It makes other people feel awkward, and they will avoid being around you. You’ll get a stigma.”
A stigma sounded nasty. It sounded like a sty, like pink-eye. Warren thought he’d seen the stigma disease described on TV, along with Crohn’s disease and erectile dysfunction. His mom’s warning had come too late to save Warren’s social life. He’d already lost friends. Every week, fewer and fewer kids came to play at his house after school. He ate lunch alone. He stood alone on the playground and watched the other kids run and laugh. He was always alone until the day Tanner fell off the monkey bars.
Warren gazed into the trees and wondered if the old tree fort was still there. He smirked and wondered if the tree fort had ever existed in this Hellhole. Had he and Tanner become friends in this Hellhole? In Nirvana?
Warren smiled. Tanner had his own stigma disease.
Tanner…Scarhead. Dumb as the rock that should have made him dead.
The scar-head stigma didn’t bother Tanner. He was immune. People, places, and things never bothered Tanner. It was as if falling off the monkey bars had given him an immunity to everything bad in the world.
When Warren really thought about it though, Tanner’s immunity hadn't started with the monkey bars, it had started when he’d come down from the tree fort…when Warren had refused to leave him alone.
Pressure built behind Warren’s forehead, and he became weary. He leaned over and reached for the lid. Gravity pulled on his aching body, and he relented. He lied down and put his cheek against the cool clay. He curled into the fetal position. No one could see him here. The bats, ants, and Doberman Pinschers of his childhood nightmares had vanished a long time ago, along with the idea that the urn was his brother. The earth spun, the urn popped, and the aroma of banana bread turned to yeast. Warren slipped into a dream about his mom, a hospital, a girl, and a white flower.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
All Because Of Me
Phyllis Gladstone sat next to Dolores Hemthorne, admiring her white, thick-soled shoes. It was nice to see Dolores taking care of her feet. Dolores had come to the Survivor’s Glory meeting—Phyllis’s Survivor’s Glory meeting—to talk about her daughter. The Survivor’s Glory meeting brought comfort to people the same way those shoes must have brought comfort to Dolores. Dolores’s shoes would make a great metaphor for today’s meeting. They were the kind of shoes nurses wore on long shifts. Dolores didn’t work at the hospital, but as a high school counselor, Phyllis supposed Dolores needed those shoes all the same. Dolores spent her days chasing high-schoolers that needed counseling. They needed counseling, but they didn’t want counseling. Phyllis often encountered the same problem with members of her meeting, but most of the time, the people at Survivor’s Glory came because they wanted help. They wanted Phyllis’s help.
The teens of Tamarack High had brought Dolores to tears many times, and Phyllis admired Dolores’s persistence. She had always encouraged Dolores to keep her job. Dolores needed to know her work wasn’t for the students, it was for the mothers of the students. No mother should ever have to experience her pain. Dolores deserved to wear comfortable shoes, and she deserved a job that gave her a purpose. If Dolores was good at her job, and Phyllis believed she was, then someday, she might convince a troubled teen that suicide is never the answer.
If someone like Dolores had helped Noah, then he wouldn’t have killed himself. Phyllis wouldn’t have gone over to Noah’s after school that day only to step in a puddle of blood seeping beneath a locked bathroom door. No one should ever have to experience something like that. No one. But for anyone who had, there was Phyllis. She was on a mission to give Dolores, and all the other members of Survivor’s Glory, a purpose.
Phyllis had arranged the plastic chairs in a healing
circle. Cassie sat across from Phyllis and Dolores. Phyllis contained her excitement behind a thin-lipped smile. She hadn’t seen Cassie at a meeting in several months. Phyllis had so many things she could say to bring Cassie comfort. If Carla Espinoza showed up, then the meeting would really soar. Poor Carla had lost her daughter in the lake last summer. Phyllis couldn’t imagine the pain that must have caused. If Carla would only come to meetings, then Phyllis could help her too. Everyone needs to deal with grief in their own way, and the only way to do that is to attend Survivor's Glory.
Phyllis put on a pair of reading glasses, opened the cover of the official Survivor’s Glory meeting binder, and read the opening message. She ran her index finger over every word. Her lips moved, and she whispered the message as much from memory as from the page. She had so enjoyed writing this after Noah's death. She smiled when her finger uncovered THIS SOLACE COMES FROM US. She closed the binder and held it against her chest with both arms.
This afternoon, I will bring solace to Dolores, Cassie, maybe Carla, and anyone else who—
John and Jackie Mapleton walked into the basement of the Hi-Way Chapel, their heads hung low. They were such a nice old couple. It was a shame that they almost never shared in the meetings. Taking their time, they sat on the seats between Cassie and Dolores. Phyllis nodded at them and smiled, but they didn’t return her greeting.
Make that Dolores, Cassie, maybe Carla, and the Mapletons. They look so sad. This is going to be great. I should start the meeting before Mark comes.
Phyllis beamed, both hands gripping her binder of glory. The hair on the back of her neck bristled, and she turned in her chair. Someone had broken one of the basement windows. Oh well, she wouldn’t let that bother her. It was nothing to cause worry, just kids playing. Several Sunday school posters hung below the broken window. The posters presented sayings like GOD MADE ME and REMEMBER TO PRAY WHEN STARTING YOUR DAY. Phyllis’s favorite was MONKEY SEE! MONKEY DO! JESUS WEPT AND SO SHOULD YOU! The floor—white tiles with specks of blue and green—made the room feel clinical. It was the perfect place for nurse’s shoes and therapy.