Shine Your Light on Me

by Lee Thompson

  Pine placed his hands on the railing and watched the crowd. Aiden heard them faintly, cry out, heard Bobby’s body splat, heard a number of people say, “Is it him? Is it the LeDoux boy?”

  And when they found out it wasn’t, they hushed, all but a couple of women who wailed in despair. Bobby’s mother, he thought, and he was glad that his own mother was already dead since now she wouldn’t have to see him die, too. There was only so much a mother could stand, no matter how tough they were.

  Aiden pulled Jessica from his arm. He pointed the girl toward the utility room where they’d played their shadow games. She took several reluctant steps away from him, and he, having taken a few deep breaths and steeling himself for the assault, charged Pine, intending to knock the monster over the railing.

  He’d always been terrified of Pine, but the anger spurred him. His plan of attack was simple: Grab Pine just below the knees, pull back and up sharply, one fluid movement, and tip the boy over the rail, watch him disappear for a moment in the blackness, and watch his body hit the ground, watch it break in the headlights, draw Jessica to him, and take her back down and return her to those who cared for her.

  And then, he didn’t know what. He couldn’t run from them, not like he was running now, Pine’s back exceptionally wide when he was five feet away, and the older boy tapping the blade against the rail. Aiden was hunched, moving fast, and Pine was turning his head, turning back toward them, smiling radiantly, as he took one step to the right, perfect timing, and Aiden, carried by momentum, slid on the steel, and flew between the rails and it felt as if he was out there in the middle of space, and every soul below was some faraway planet.

  He flailed for the railing, trying to grab on to something, anything. And he felt it, cold and hard beneath his palm, only his knees and feet sticking back up between the barriers. He got his other hand up and braced himself. He was nearly upside down, wasn’t sure if he had the strength to pull himself back onto the platform, or if Pine would allow it.

  All the headlights in the pasture illuminated the agitated bodies, some of them lifting flashlights, the weak beams unable to reach him.

  His father tried to roll closer but there were people in the way, unmovable, despite his striking them. He looked at Bobby’s body, his mother and Cindy kneeling in the bloody snow, wiping their eyes, trying to hold on to each other.

  Above and behind him, Pine chuckled and knelt. Aiden let go with one hand and twisted his torso sharply, swung his arm wide, and caught again, so that he was facing up, and he could feel all that distance beneath him.

  Only four feet separated him and the boy with the horn growing from his forehead. Pine said, “You’re different than you were before.”

  Help me up, Aiden thought, his grip slipping, fingers tingling, his face too hot, his ears closing off to all sound, his breathing suddenly labored.

  Pine said, “I could help you up. People would like that. But I’m not into saving people.”

  He raised the Bowie and put it inches above Aiden’s fingers.

  Pine’s face grew placid, uninvolved.

  It was scarier than his smile.

  He lowered the knife an inch, Jessica crying softly behind him. Aiden heard his dad call his name, and then Emmy and Connor, and all he could think was, I’m coming down, people...

  Pine’s face went from expressionless to surprise, and at first Aiden thought the light was shining from his face, but it wasn’t that, it was Elroy behind his twin. He pulled a pocket knife from Pine’s back and was about to stab him again until Pine roared and spun, swung the Bowie and the blade opened Elroy’s forehead.

  His blood sprayed out, down, into his eyes, down his cheeks, and he sputtered on it and stumbled a couple steps back. He stabbed at Pine again, blindly, but nicked a piece of his neck. Pine held tightly to his knife, used his free hand to feel the wound near his throat and lashed at Elroy again but fell face forward, hitting the platform hard, turned over onto his side and touched the wound in his kidney, his fingers wet and red. He paled and twisted back and forth as if trying to put out the fire consuming him.

  And Aiden felt a fire in himself, his fingers numb and aching and slipping, and Jessica moved forward, trying to support Elroy as he scooted closer to the edge and grabbed Aiden’s wrist.

  And then Pine was up again, closing in on his brother and his niece.

  Elroy’s hands were cold and slick with his blood and he couldn’t hold on, and neither could Aiden, who was terrified of falling, and landing, and dying, of leaving his father alone in the world with nothing left to hold but his misery.

  The pressure in his head slid down into his chest and then his stomach.

  It grew exponentially in a single moment, a hundred times a hundred more intense than it had been, and then he was blinded by it, almost deafened by it, but he heard Elroy say, “God!” And Jessica’s feet on the hard steel as she sprang back, and cried out for her mother, and for Aiden, and then a gunshot rang out and the bullet whizzed overhead, and Aiden couldn’t hold on any longer.

  He let go, maybe, ready to embrace them all, despite the feeling he had of falling through a cold void, the loneliness greater than he had expected it to be, until the sense of falling and the fear of this great loneliness just up and disappeared with him.

  CHAPTER 9

  Aria was still angry and hurt by Mitch’s walking away after she’d told him what Pine had done to his daughter. She broke out of the group that held her and made her way back to Jack. Together they heard the scuffle, faintly, up on the platform, and then it grew quiet for several moments, a minute perhaps. Then she pointed and people around them gasped as a body plummeted from the heights. She couldn’t tell who it was, or even its gender, just saw the dark blur until it hit the ground and bounded three feet in the air before coming to rest, finally, permanently.

  Next to her, Jack screamed, “Aiden!”

  She had never witnessed him cry, much like Mickey. Others moved in a wall toward the body, some, in the back, hollered, “Is it him? Is it the LeDoux boy?” And those closest to the corpse shook their heads and backed away and looked at the sky.

  Jack had left her side—she hadn’t even noticed—and was trying to maul his way toward the corpse until he saw the principal’s wife, Mrs. Russell, and Bobby’s girlfriend Cindy, on their knees in the snow, touching his shoulders, one of them shaking him as if they could wake him up.

  Thankfully, his head was ten feet from the body, facing the water tower. Neither of them approached it, and Aria couldn’t blame them. Mr. Russell hung back, the megaphone held loosely in his hand, his expression so shocked, Aria could never have explained it to anyone.

  She felt for their family, wanted to embrace all of them, but then there was another cry from above and the light shone from Aiden, but it shot up against the water tower and left those on the ground in the near-dark.

  It washed out the faraway faces—Elroy’s and Jessica’s—Pine behind them, and staggering forward, wounded she thought, but going to hurt all of them badly. And Elroy and Jessica were trying to hold on to Aiden, but he slipped free and the light died just as a gunshot rung out from the crowd and Aiden’s body fell soundlessly, Jack’s boy staring at the sky all the way down.

  She couldn’t watch him land.

  She turned around, noticed that it had begun snowing again, lightly.

  The rifle shot echoed across the field and into the woods and the air smelled of the spent cartridge. She noticed Mitch among a group of men. He had the rifle to his shoulder and he lowered it slowly when he saw her looking, his face as washed of color as Elroy’s and Jessica’s had been.

  He turned and handed the rifle to another man and was about to run for the ladder to make sure Pine was dead and his daughter was okay, when Aiden struck the snow next to Bobby Russell and pieces of that snow hit her hard, chunks of ice like hornets stinging her neck, the jawline reddened and sore.

  The crowd sobbed.

  Most of them dropped their flashlights.
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  They held up their hands, to ward off such a bad omen, and moved away.

  Only Jack was left in front of her, but he didn’t see her at all.

  • • •

  The first time he’d seen a body falling from the platform, seen a dark shape near the railing, one he knew could only be Pine lift the form over and let go, he had been certain it was his son and something in his mind and something in his heart snapped.

  There was never turning away from a moment like that. He heard it snap, like a bow string breaking, a twang, high-pitched, irrevocable.

  But when they said it wasn’t Aiden, when he saw the Russell mom near the boy, and he knew it was Bobby, there wasn’t any relief from what he felt. He watched the platform. Heard screams above, saw his son hanging there, watched the light bask Elroy and Jessica and Pine, and then, even though the kids were trying to help Aiden back onto the platform, they failed and he hung there for what felt like forever to Jack, hung in the black sky, a little splotch of white, a human kite stuck by lightning.

  And Jack heard the rifle fired somewhere close by, which was good, because it attracted his attention and he didn’t have to see his boy hit the earth. But he heard it, and he heard the grief and disappointment rise like a tide around him, felt it grow inside him, too, a greater tide, and for a second he thought that Mitch was the reason Aiden had fallen. But he heard Aria in front of him—everybody else had stepped back, nothing to see here, nothing to gain for free—and Aria said, “Mitch shot Pine.”

  Mitch was at the ladder then, grabbing hold of it, climbing to his daughter and Elroy, who sat near the edge, so high above. Flashlights lie on the ground, seeming to make pockets of snow glow in places. There was no light around Aiden or Bobby.

  He stared at them until Aria knelt between his legs and touched his cheek, stroked his face like his mother had when he had been a child, sick, unable to rise from bed, and Aria cried with him while the townsfolk moved farther away, their heads hung in shame, he hoped, although he suspected they felt no shame, only their loss, their what-might-have-been.

  They were lost again in the mundane they had always known, and Jack was glad for that at least. He said, “They killed him.”

  Aria hugged him and shushed him and held him tighter, and up on the platform Mitch screamed down that his daughter was alive, she was all right.

  • • •

  Mitch had not been aware that Aiden had fallen until he reached the platform and climbed on to it. The air was much colder up there and a light snow was falling. It swirled on the steel between him and the three kids. Pine lay on his back, unmoving. It had been risky, taking that shot, but it was one Mitch had known he must take. Mitch had always known Pine was different, that he enjoyed hurting people, but he hadn’t expected him to take his needs out on his own family.

  Elroy and Jessica.

  He felt like crying, just looking at them. They were still looking down over the railing. They didn’t hear him coming up behind them and he didn’t want to startle them. His daughter clung to Elroy’s arm, and Mitch said his daughter’s name very softly.

  She looked back at him as if she didn’t recognize him at first, not with his torn clothing, his hair a mess, the worry that had aged him, the strange pang of guilt eating at him for having to kill Pine. He knew he was a mess, and he knew she needed time to realize that he was truly there.

  Elroy had blood covering his face, the front of his shirt. He squeezed Jessica from the side and said to Mitch, “He healed me, right before he fell. Pine would have killed him. He cut my head open.”

  There were tears in his eyes, and he let them fall, no shame there. He smiled and leaned over and kissed the top of Jessica’s head. He looked at Pine then, his face a patchwork of emotion.

  Mitch said, “I had to shoot Pine.”

  Elroy nodded and said, “He was hurting her. Aria caught him.”

  “I know.” He scooped Jessica up in his arms. She felt heavier than she had before. He held her so tightly that she had to tell him he was squashing her. He eased up the best he could and painted the side of her face with kisses, stroked her hair and felt Elroy’s blood in it, drying now, or freezing there. He said, “I have to get you home and get you a bath. Nobody will ever hurt you again, I promise.”

  Elroy said, “Did Aiden survive the fall?”

  Mitch shook his head.

  “We all killed him,” Elroy said. “He went after Pine to protect her too, and we all killed him.”

  “I know,” Mitch said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as his parents and me and Jessica. Aiden was a good person and...”

  “It’s okay,” Mitch said. “Let’s get you home too. We can worry about how we feel tomorrow, after we’re clean and we’ve all slept. Do you want to come to my house?”

  Elroy nodded. He followed Mitch and Jessica toward the ladder. Mitch was so exhausted he was worried about carrying her all the way down. He looked back at Pine and the blood around him, smeared, but slowly being covered by snow, thinking to himself that there was a beginning and ending for everything.

  CHAPTER 10

  Aria suspected she’d sleep until the following noon, but a tremor shook the house shortly after 8 a.m. and she could not find rest again. The prior night, she’d brought Jack back to the home she had tried to build with Mickey—who still lay dead on the living room floor, maybe content with it in ways he had never been content with living—and Jack, overcome by the events, and the events that had preceded watching his wife be torn apart, and his son fall from the sky, had fallen quickly asleep on the couch.

  He was still asleep when someone knocked on the door and she answered, wearing her robe, her hair a mess, without makeup, her whole body sore. A state policeman, dark-haired, cursed by a severe face, and skinny with the flat stomach of youth, but the suspicious, probing eyes of authority, told her why he was there. A simple statement about last night’s deaths and any part she had played in it. She invited him inside and he followed her into the living room and she pointed at Mickey, as if he was a thing and not a person, and she said, “He died last night. I think it was a heart attack.”

  The trooper asked, “And you’re just reporting this now?”

  She shrugged, said, “It was a busy night.”

  He asked if there was somewhere they could sit, noticing Jack burrowed into a quilt on the couch. “Who’s that?”

  “A friend,” she said. “Maybe the only one I have in the world.”

  He cocked his head and studied her, maybe suspecting that she was playing some kind of game. She led him to the kitchen, offered him coffee, which he declined. She made some for herself and for Jack once he woke. While she busied herself, the policeman called in about Mickey and gave the address and set his black-leather pad on the table. He clicked his pen several times, impatient. Aria couldn’t imagine the stories he’d heard from others, well, she could imagine that, but she couldn’t imagine how someone who hadn’t seen it first-hand would be able to accept it took place. He said, “Tell me about it.”

  She told him most of it. She left out the part of Mickey attacking her. It wasn’t important. She’d torn the pages from that part of her life and threw them in the fire alongside the burning remains of Pine’s collection. And she didn’t tell him that Mitch had shot his brother. She doubted anyone else in town would. If anything, the majority would have liked to have done it themselves. But it was right his brother was the one. It was right Jessica was home and would not endure further scarring.

  She was surprised her eyes had moistened. She did not feel much emotion at all, at least not on the surface. But so many things had begun to play out in her mind, and once the train got moving, once it gained momentum, there was no way to stop it.

  The trooper let her cry it out. When she finished, he looked bored and asked for a cup of coffee. She made him one, not in the least ashamed by her tears. She figured others he’d talked to had cried as well.

  For the loss of a good kid. />
  For the loss of more miracles.

  For the questions it had raised in each of them.

  She said, “I’d like to be alone now. But thank you for the company.”

  He put his hat on at the door, nodded once, and offered a little wave, and she realized his hands looked too large for the rest of him. She watched him walk to his car and escape. She wished him God speed.

  She didn’t know about the bombs going off at the high school until Elroy brought Jack’s van over. After he told her about the explosions, he hiked his thumb over his shoulder at the window and the van, dented in places, and filthy, the windshield cracked, and he said, “Mitch said he wants to apologize for stealing it.”

  “He has a lot more than that to apologize for.”

  “Jack’s here, isn’t he? I went by his house and the bar, thinking that maybe he and Aiden would be at one or the other, like maybe it was all just a bad dream. “

  “It wasn’t a dream.” She looked at her watch. It was just after noon. “An ambulance is on the way here.

  “For what?”

  “Your dad had a heart attack last night.”

  He nodded as if these things happen, or maybe because he’d had his fill of grief, his cup full of it. He didn’t ask how his dad was fairing and she didn’t offer any more information. She had always liked Elroy, to a degree at least, but something had changed in her, she saw the O’Connell’s and she saw herself leaving them, erasing herself from their lives, and never thinking of any of them again.

  Elroy pointed at her jaw. He appeared nervous about it. Aria said, “It’s nothing. Just the price I had to pay for doing what was right. They’re the easiest scars to carry.”

  Faintly she heard sirens in the distance. The front door was ajar, washing the house with a crispness, the first signs of an Indian summer, or an early spring. Elroy said, “They must have found some people in the school.” She didn’t know what he was talking about, and really didn’t care, but he told her anyway. And then he said, “Bobby had warned me away from the school.” His expression shifted. He said, perplexed, “What do you make of all this? What happened to Aiden at the bar? What happened afterwards?”