Just as we’re about to collide, a flash of light goes off between us.
And the last thing I hear is shattering glass.
83
The light fades, and I realize I’m . . .
What?
I’m back on the road again, driving the same path as before, rain pounding my windshield, wind sweeping up. I turn my head to the right and see that Devon is . . .
Alive?
Jake barks.
What’s happening?
Jake barks again, this time with more insistence. I look over my shoulder at him.
Devon yells, “Daddy! Watch out!”
Plonk.
Something hits the windshield. I whip around and catch the rubber ball on a trajectory toward the road. But before it has a chance to meet ground, the boy in the red hoodie appears from out of nowhere and goes chasing after it.
The ball bounces on the asphalt, bounces again, then lands and begins to roll. The boy dashes after it, putting himself directly into my path.
I slam on the brakes. The car swerves. Devon cries out. Jake yelps.
We miss the boy.
But the car wheels into a monstrous spin, then careens off the road. A muddy skid propels us even faster, and now we’re headed straight for the Evil Tree.
Headlight beams mix with rain and obscure my vision. We are about to hit the tree when an explosion of white light blinds me.
I wake up seconds later, rub my eyes.
Wait. Seconds? Or is it weeks? Months?
I don’t know. I don’t know . . . Oh, God, I don’t know.
Everything is tilted.
I look out my side window, see the tree a few feet away, and realize we narrowly escaped the collision by landing in a ditch.
My son lets out a whispery moan.
“Devon!”
His eyes are half open, his shirt quickly darkening with blood that runs from the gash across his neck. So much blood.
Jake lets out a frightened howl from the backseat.
I reach for an old T-shirt, a roll of tape from the glove compartment. I wrap both around Devon’s neck, hoping to stem the flow of blood.
But it’s too much blood, coming out way too fast. I scramble for my cell, try dialing out, but the signal keeps dropping. I crank down the window, extend my phone outside. The effort proves useless.
“Daddy, I’m scared,” Devon says, voice so frail that I can barely hear it.
I crank the ignition key, slam the gearshift, punch the pedal. My car thrusts forward and the tires whine as we move out of the ditch and back toward the road.
But halfway up, it becomes clear we won’t make it. There’s not enough traction in the mud. And there is still no cell signal.
The wind howls, the rain picks up, and I’m so scared of losing my son.
“Daddy . . . please . . . help me . . . ” His eyes are almost half closed, body swaying weakly, swaying sickly, the blood now pooling in his lap.
I slide the car to a stop, then turn the steering wheel hard, jamming the tires sideways into the turf in an effort to anchor us. Then I sling the door open and race for the road. Jake gives a sharp bark and jumps out of the door behind me, then trots in my path as I run.
Four agonizing breaths later, bars appear on my phone. I dial.
“911. What is your emergency?”
“My son—” I can barely get my sentence out, the most important I’ve ever had to speak.
I hear a strident groan coming from behind me, then the crackling of dirt as tires grind against asphalt. I reel around.
The car is sliding downhill.
And through the windshield I glimpse Devon, head dropped back, body joggling loosely to every crack and bump in the road.
“No! NOOOO!”
I chase after the car, feet pounding pavement, but I’m no match for the gravity that pulls my son downhill. Still, I keep running as the car picks up speed. Tiny stones pop beneath the tires like spiteful messengers of tragedy. Jake lets out a mournful moan. I can’t hear Devon, but through the glass I see his mouth saying, Daddy. And though I keep running as fast as I can, I’m too slow to reach the car before it slams sideways into the tree.
“DEVON! NOOOOO!” I crumple to the pavement. My body collapses onto itself.
The white light goes off, this time as if exploding through my veins.
In a flash, I’m standing motionless and numb, mind dazed, as medics pry open the car door. They pull my son’s body out and lay him across the base of the tree.
Again, the light explodes.
Jenna and I are rigid with misery in a hospital hallway, speaking to a doctor. His mouth is moving, but the message comes out so slow, so thick and muddled, that I can’t understand it.
Until I do.
I let out an agonizing wail. Jenna collapses into tears.
And as I watch this event play out, the sudden yet inexplicable realization that I’ve experienced my son’s death twice—first at Donny Ray’s hands, and then at my own—destroys me.
Trying to offer comfort, the doctor reaches for my shoulder. I grab the pen from his lab coat pocket, then jab it into my wrist. And I keep jabbing. A river of red pours out of me and crawls along the floor. A river of pain, of regret . . . of loss.
And I feel my heart slow, my whole existence fragment. There is no sound, there is no light. There is unequivocally . . .
Nothing.
Nothingness that tumbles into an abyss, a deep, black, penetrating hole, as everything around me disintegrates into complete, encompassing darkness.
I disappear.
I am gone.
84
I’m back on the road, but now it looks different. On this road, the sun is shining, the air is clear, and I can see ahead for miles and miles. Tall meadows with grass the color of finely polished emeralds sway effortlessly to the decree of a gentle breeze. Distant mountains stand tall and proud, cloudless skies just above their peaks. I’m not sure where this road leads, but that hardly seems to matter, because I know it moves in the right direction.
“It’s pretty, Daddy,” Devon says.
I smile at him. “It really is.”
“And perfect.”
“Absolutely perfect.”
“Daddy?”
“Yeah, kiddo?”
“Let’s stay like this forever, okay? Just like this.”
A statement strikingly familiar, and yet I’m not sure why, as if it comes from some other place. Some other time.
“Sure,” I say. “We’ll stay this way.”
“Promise me, Daddy.”
“Promise.” I glance at him and the wisdom of youth shines back on me. I see purity, unblemished truth. And some part of me—one I can’t even quantify—understands that there is indeed so much beauty in truth, so much relief.
We continue on our journey, no further conversation, nothing but joyful silence holding us together. My son and I, joined by something that feels like happiness, like freedom.
A tree comes into view ahead, its peach-colored blossoms sprouting like wings from branches that reach toward the heavens as if in welcome. We move past the tree, and I steal one last glance at it through the rearview mirror, watching it fade into the distance.
“Daddy, look,” Devon says.
He’s pointing through the windshield, toward the sky, eyes wide with wonder. I follow his gaze and see that two birds have joined us on our journey. Winging side by side in perfect unison, their paired movement seems effortless and yet so magnificent.
So meant to be.
We watch together. A few moments later, the two birds lift up through the air. One curves gracefully to the right; the other continues onward.
“There we go, Daddy,” Devon says. “There we go . . .”
I smile.
&nb
sp; But when I turn my head, I find an empty seat beside me. Now I, too, am traveling alone, and I know that my son really is . . .
Gone.
The flash of light goes off, but this time it fades to the rhythm of a gentle, beating heart.
85
“Christopher, wake up. Can you wake up?”
I have to wake up . . . Someone’s telling me I have to wake up.
My eyes flick open.
I wake up, or I come to life, or . . . I do something. I’m not actually sure. I’m not even sure where I’ve been. My mind seems so vacant, my body so . . .
I run my hands up and down beneath me.
Sheets. I’m in a bed.
My vision clears, and I see eyes. I study the face, a man’s, but I don’t recognize him. I lick my parched and cracked lips, try to swallow, but my tongue gets stuck to the back of my throat. It’s like I’ve been asleep for years, like I—
“Christopher,” the man says. He steps back to observe me, and I study his face more closely.
A decent man with kind eyes.
“Welcome back,” this man says with his gentle smile.
I’ve been somewhere, probably for quite some time, but I don’t—
“How long have I . . . ?” My question comes out weak and crackly, but before the man can answer, I fall away into darkness. I disappear.
I’m gone.
Again.
I blink a few times.
My body and mind feel . . .
Better? Just a little stronger, maybe?
The man is no longer here, and I wonder if he ever existed because nothing around me seems real—nothing is tangible.
I look to the doorway, light spilling through it, but my eyes can’t adjust. I can’t tell what’s on the other side.
The other side.
A dark object moves through the light.
“Took a little breather there, did you?” the object says, and I recognize the man’s voice, see his fuzzy outline, but before I can get a better fix on him, darkness snatches the opportunity away, falling over me, and again, my world disappears.
Again, I am gone.
I’m not sure what day it is. I’m unclear how long it’s been since I first woke up, and I certainly don’t know the length of time I was lying here before that.
I don’t even know where here is.
Well, I know it’s a hospital, and the man with kind eyes is a doctor of some sort. Someone might have explained more, but if they did, it eludes me. Time and memory are flexible in my grasp.
The next minutes, or hours, or days, continue this way. Periods of light—or life—followed by periods of darkness. During the times I am present, the man reappears. This man tells me things, and while I have a hard time retaining most of them, there is one that sticks with me.
You’ve come a long way, Christopher.
But on this morning, or this afternoon, or—I can’t really tell the time of day—I feel significantly better. My mind is less cloudy, sight clearer, limbs a little sturdier. And I see . . .
Sunlight?
My vision wanders through the clearing haze and finds a window. I blink and squint as my eyes adjust to harsh rays bending through the pane. There are blue skies, and as I drop my gaze toward the ground, shiny reflections of light dance and bound back at me.
Cars. I’m looking at cars, lots of them lined up in neat little rows.
A parking lot.
I’m about to look back into the room, when something on the windowsill captures my attention. A book of some kind—no, it’s actually a notebook, and now my curiosity widens, because I wonder what’s on its pages. Curiosity that brings my legs to the floor and feet moving toward the window in slow, unsteady steps.
I reach for the notebook, open it.
And there I find sequences of numbers and letters running down the paper in orderly columns. I flip through the rest, and page after page, line after line, it’s all the same—a seemingly endless array of alphanumeric codes in handwriting that looks familiar.
My handwriting.
I have no memory of jotting down this information, but there isn’t much I can recall these days. I stare out my window at the parking lot, wondering what this all means, then do a double take at one of the cars. I look in the notebook, then at the car, then back inside the notebook. The vehicle’s license plate tag matches one of the entries on this page.
I study the rows of numbers, stare out at the parking lot with its rows and rows of cars, and a vague wave of familiarity rolls through me.
I return to bed, and an overwhelming yet inexplicable sense of heartbreak fades into darkness.
86
“How are you doing there?”
The man is back. I am back.
“What . . . where have I—?” It’s easier to speak now.
“Everything is okay,” he says. “All of this is normal.”
I’m not sure what normal is, because my world feels so indescribably abnormal.
“Tell me what’s happened,” I say. “Tell me how I got here.”
“You’ve come a long way, Christopher.”
“But where have I been?”
“That story,” he says, “is even longer.”
After pulling a chair close to my bed, he sits, and for the first time I notice the badge clipped to his shirt.
Dr. Donald Raymond.
Also for the first time, I realize how pale his blue eyes are.
“Donald Raymond,” I say. “Donny—” My body stiffens.
“It’s okay.” He places a hand on my arm to offer comfort. “You don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
And something in his voice tells me I don’t.
“It was . . .”
“Go on,” he encourages, watching me with care.
“Like looking in a mirror . . . you were my . . . everything was . . .”
“Reversed,” he says with a nod of gentle acknowledgment.
Doctor Raymond clasps his hands together and peers out through the window across my room. I can tell he’s thinking that where we’re going won’t be easy.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Christopher, do you understand where you are right now?”
“A hospital.”
He nods. “Do you know which?”
I shake my head.
“This is Loveland Psychiatric Hospital.”
The name jogs my memory as images lift through the entrenched layers of my mind. “I . . . I think I remember being here.”
“I expected you might. The thing is, those memories are going to be flawed.”
“Flawed?”
“Mired by distortions—most of them, anyway. Now that you’ve come out of your previous state, we can straighten those out.”
“Out of what state?”
“The one you went into a year ago.”
“Wait . . . A year? I’ve been here for a year?”
“Your body was. As for your mind . . . that’s a different story.”
A vision streaks through my memory. I can’t identify it. Something dark and swift, much like a bounding shadow. “It’s like my brain keeps turning the memories on and off, and they happen so fast, I have trouble grabbing hold of—”
No sooner does the last word leave my mouth than it happens again. Another phantom memory slips through my consciousness, and a floodgate breaks open, images and sounds firing through it.
I see Loveland’s dark walls swelling, pulsating, and closing in all around me. I see the shadowy hallways of Alpha Twelve, every door swung open, eerie white light spilling out through them. I hear screams, mad cries, and . . .
This place is broken!
I try to chase it all away, but sitting directly across from me now is a psychopath named Donny Ray Smith, drilling me wi
th those eyes. He rises from the chair and reaches toward me. I lurch back, but before he gets close enough, like falling and glittery dust, Donny Ray dissipates.
Dr. Raymond returns.
“Christopher?”
I land headlong back into the moment and shudder, trying to get a grasp on my mercurial mind.
“It’s okay,” he assures me. “You don’t have to be frightened anymore. Those memories aren’t real. They were all products of delusional thought, caused by your illness.”
“But what illness?”
“The one that made your mind shut down.”
“What are you telling me? That I suffered from some kind of psychotic episode?”
He smiles gently. “For now, let’s not talk doctor to doctor. You’re used to being the one doing the diagnosis, but that will only confuse matters and make you more anxious.”
I look into his blue eyes, and a line of logic begins to sharpen. I connect with the exact feeling I had after first realizing that Donny Ray wanted to take Devon away. But as that sensation grabs hold, with it comes so much fear.
“You . . . you killed my . . . ,” I say, still attempting to narrow the gap between reality and make-believe.
He shakes his head. “You only thought so.”
Confusion sends my vision circling the room, and I notice a painting that hangs on the wall. As I stare at the image of a young girl wearing a blue dress, another surge of memory strikes through me, then a hazy recollection drifts to the surface.
“You and I . . . we’ve been talking all this time . . .”
“We have, but your brain couldn’t interpret our therapy properly. Your perceptions became mottled. It was in fact like looking into a mirror, but that mirror was cracked. Your mind was throwing distortions back at you.”
The reflections in your mind have been blinding you, Christopher.
“I . . . I don’t understand. Everything happened. I remember it all so clearly.”
“I know it very much looked and felt like reality, and in your state, it became nearly impossible for you to tell the difference. I’ve been trying to help you find your way back. It’s why you were brought here.”
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