Drawn Away

by Holly Bennett

  And, God help me, I ran up the gangplank.

  LUCY

  There was more—about her misery during the crossing, their struggles to get established in Boston and the happiness she found with Donal and their other children. But I wasn’t ready to read any of that. I couldn’t stop thinking about Klara, about how she had had not one, but two chances for a decent life, and lost them both. What had killed the grandmother, I wondered, and led the grandfather to dump the baby at her stepfather’s door? Was he just not able to manage with so many children and his wife gone, or had he always rejected her—the illegitimate child of his scandalous daughter?

  I flipped idly through the rest of the pages, not really reading, until my eyes fell on these words on the last page:

  I wish to God I could let my daughter know that I loved her. I have prayed every day of my life that she was happy in my parents’ home, as I was, and that she found a loving husband, as I did. Losing her has been my constant, secret sorrow.

  I was bawling now—and just about asphyxiating from trying to do it silently. If my mom woke up she would think I was crying for Grampa, which would make a lot more sense than falling to pieces over a little girl who lived two centuries ago. Though, now that I thought of it, maybe I was crying for Grampa, and my dad, and every lonely, scared, sad thing I could ever remember. I had a good long cry with two hotel pillows mashed over my head, and then I tiptoed into the bathroom, washed my face and texted Jack. Miss you so much. Klara’s story is the saddest ever. Wish you were here right now!

  TWENTY-THREE

  KLARA

  I am so lonely, I feel I will go mad with it. How have I stood here all these years, never even noticing how alone I am?

  I thought of my mother earlier today, and such a wave of anguish shuddered through me that I found myself sobbing and gasping as though she was being torn out of my hands that very moment. But she was never torn; she left of her own accord. I see now, in a way I never did in life, that it was my father she was fleeing. But she left me behind, and with a man she knew would not care for me. I hate her.

  Jack must come and stay with me. I will have someone of my own, someone who won’t leave me. Not ever.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  JACK

  Lucy and I were so amazed and excited about stumbling on the real Match Girl and her story that we almost forgot why we had been looking for it in the first place. I mean, not really, but we felt for a while as though finding the answer to this little mystery had actually solved the problem. We just floated around in this little oh-my-god-what-an-incredible-discovery bubble.

  And I felt normal again—just having Lucy around lifted my spirits and blew away the creepy cobwebs. But between being sick and her trip to Ottawa, she was even farther behind at school than I was, so our playtime was rationed. We made a pact that we could have homework dates as long as we actually got something done, and we more or less stuck to our vows.

  A good week went by before reality reasserted itself. The reality was, we were no closer than before to knowing what to do about my little problem. And the next full moon was less than two weeks away.

  The “stretched” feeling, when it came back, was almost imperceptible. If I thought about it, I felt it. If my mind was on something else, I didn’t notice it. With something like this, it’s a reasonable bet that thinking about it is what’s making you feel that way, so I just tried to keep busy with other things. I didn’t want to mess up Lucy’s work—I knew how important it was to her to get through high school with no other screwups—so I didn’t say anything at first. But as the moon waxed, it became harder and harder to ignore, like a noose slowly tightening around my neck.

  Finally, with the full moon only a week away, I spoke up.

  Her mom was in Ottawa for the weekend, sorting things out with her grandfather’s house, so we had the place to ourselves and were taking full advantage. I had just discovered the tattoo on her left shoulder blade, a very kissable intertwined pattern she called a Celtic knot, when my mood suddenly changed. “Hey, Lucy.”

  She pulled away from me, responding to the serious tone of my voice, and I mentally kicked myself for stupid timing. Why I decided to blurt it out in the middle of our most intense make-out session ever, I’ll never know. Lowered inhibition? I could tell by the expectation in her face that she thought I wanted to talk about sleeping together. Which I did—or would have back when being kidnapped by a ghost wasn’t derailing the normal course of my life.

  I smoothed her hair—not that Lucy’s hair ever really “smoothed”—trying to cool things down a little. “Sorry. This is not…it’s just—do you think you might be up for doing that spell-breaking thing again?”

  She stared at me kind of blankly—I could almost see her brain shifting gears, reorienting—and then the realization that had caught up with me a week back washed over her.

  “Oh God. She’s still out there, still waiting for you. Of course she is. What the hell are we doing?”

  She rummaged around, doing up her bra, untangling her legs from mine. By the time she sat herself straight on the edge of the bed and looked at me, she was all business.

  “I’m sorry, Jack, I don’t know how I—”

  “It’s not your fault,” I cut in. “It happened to me too. I zoned out somehow. But I’ve been feeling really weird the last few days, too weird to ignore. And I can’t think of anything else to do.”

  “I’ll need a few minutes to get everything together,” she said, and off she went. It wasn’t long before I found myself cross-legged at the coffee table again, holding Lucy’s hand and staring at the candle flame.

  I felt a little better when it was done, but I didn’t notice a dramatic release like the time before. More like the noose was loosened but not cut.

  The “plan” we devised for the days leading up to the full moon was feeble, but it was all we had.

  “It seems like when this happens, you’re always in a sort of blanked-out, daydreamy state,” said Lucy.

  “I was doing math when it first happened,” I protested.

  “Oh. Well, were you zoning out a bit?”

  “I dunno. Maybe.”

  “At any rate, you’re more vulnerable to it when you’re daydreaming—yes?”

  “Yes.” That much was clear.

  “So can you spend the next four days being really focused and active?”

  I barked out a laugh that must have sounded as frustrated and helpless as I felt, because she immediately backtracked. “Right. Sorry. That was dumb.”

  Still, I did end up with a little list of precautions: no booze, no dope, no posing for drawings, no gazing up at the stars, no lying in bed listening to music. No video games unless with a friend—too hypnotic.

  “What about sleeping?” A bleak question. Short of an amphetamine overdose, how could I possibly keep myself awake for four nights?

  Lucy considered. “Has it ever happened while you’re sleeping?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then you’re at least as safe, if not safer, sleeping than wandering around in a sleep-deprived daze,” she said.

  The night before the full moon, and again the night of, we repeated the spell-breaking ritual. I didn’t feel any dramatic effects, but it was worth it just for the way Lucy’s hand felt in mine—like a strong anchor. After two days on high alert, not sleeping well and fighting that stretched, drawn-out feeling, I began to breathe a little easier. The moon was on the wane, and so far I’d managed to stay put. Maybe the spell had worked, or the Match Girl had moved on. Maybe it would be all right.

  Wrong.

  “Noah! Let’s go! We were supposed to be on the road ten minutes ago.” My dad’s voice came booming up the stairs and into my brain.

  I groaned and mashed the pillow over my ears, intent on going back to sleep.

  Sunday morning. My parents didn’t go to church, but they had retained some remnant idea that Sunday morning was special—meaning, in our case, a lazy interlude when kids can sl
eep in unmolested and parents can sit around drinking coffee and reading the paper for as long as they want. Hockey had changed all that.

  I remembered now that Noah had a tournament, and my parents were driving him, plus some other kids, an hour and a half out of town to get there. Then I remembered why lying around dozing in bed might not be such a good idea. I groaned again and heaved myself out of the warm covers.

  I got downstairs in time to blearily wave them off. Mom, I noticed, had armed herself with her knitting bag. I smirked into my coffee mug. She was determined to support Noah in his “passions,” but she just did not get hockey. So while the other parents were glued to the game, yelling and cheering, she would be hunched into her parka, peering at her knitting needles. It was better, I guessed, than having one of those psychotic screamer parents, but likely a little embarrassing all the same.

  The day yawned before me. Lucy had a shift at the café and then was having dinner out with her mom. It was Alice’s birthday in a few days, but since she worked most nights, they’d decided to celebrate on her day off. “I feel bad leaving you on your own all day,” Lucy had said. “It’s just… she seems to really want to have a nice dinner with me, and I don’t want to lose the ground we gained in Ottawa.”

  “Geez, you don’t have to apologize.” I still couldn’t quite get my head around a family in which a birthday dinner wasn’t completely expected. “Anyway, my parents and Noah will be back early this evening. And the moon is waning—I really feel like we’re over the hump. I’ll be fine.”

  Still, I planned to be damn careful. I laid out my day like a drill sergeant: breakfast, shower (not too long), dog walk. I cleaned out the rat cage and let the girls run around in my room. I did homework, had lunch and did the dishes Mom had asked me to take care of. Another walk and a wander through Facebook. But a focused wander, I reminded myself.

  It was midafternoon when I realized I was feeling really sluggish—all I really wanted to do was take a nap. I checked my sugar, and sure enough, it had zoomed up into the low 20s. Ugh. I should have been well down from lunch by now. Had I forgotten my lunch insulin? I checked my pump history—no, there it was. My infusion set was only a day old and should still be fine, but I took a correction dose by injection just to be safe.

  The urge to lie down and veg out was strong, as if I’d been high all day rather than just since lunch. I got myself a big bottle of water, sat myself on the couch with my computer and loaded up Netflix, searching for something exciting enough that it would keep me from spacing out. Reruns of The Walking Dead? Good enough.

  I came to with a start, my heart pounding. Oh no, have I…? It was okay though; I was still in the real world. Or, on second thought, maybe not so okay—I really did feel like shit. I pulled out my meter.

  Twenty-eight. What the hell? All that insulin, and I was going up—way up—not down. I padded to the bathroom, peed about a quart, drank more water and took another shot from a fresh vial of insulin. Then I changed my set for good measure, and after that there was nothing to do but wait.

  I couldn’t find any reason for this weird spike. But whatever—I’d had stubborn highs before. In the end it came down to math and chemistry: a big enough load of insulin will eventually bring down your blood sugar. The main danger was that once it started dropping, it could go really fast and send me low. So I got myself a can of Coke to have on hand, just in case, and went back to Rick Grimes and his crew.

  LUCY

  Mom picked me up after work, and we went to a new Thai restaurant. “I fancy something they never serve at work,” she explained. After we ordered, I slipped her the present I’d picked up at the silversmith shop next to the café.

  “Sorry it’s not wrapped,” I said. “I only got it today.” What I wanted to say, but didn’t, was: Sorry I completely ignored your birthday the year Dad died, and only managed a crappy drugstore card in the years since.

  But she was shaking her head over the silver hoops. “Lucy, they’re beautiful—I love them. Thank you.”

  “I’ll make you a cake on your real birthday.”

  Last year—or even a few months back—if either of us had said that, the other would have automatically dished back something along the lines of, You don’t need to bother. Instead, my mom asked, “Stay up and eat it with me after work?”

  “It’s a date.”

  We grinned at each other, and then her eyes got all teary and, like it was contagious, mine did too. Something had definitely gotten into us lately, and in my spookier moments (which were a lot more frequent than they used to be), I suspected that something was my Grampa Shamus.

  “God, what a couple of sucks.” I dabbed at my eyes as the waiter arrived with my iced tea and my mom’s wine. Her big splurge on her birthday was ordering one glass of the fancier wine instead of the cheap house wine. While we waited for our food, I showed her the special acid-free folder I’d picked up at Michael’s during my work break, with Sigrid’s homemade book safely protected inside. I’d been worried about crumpling or damaging it, so I was glad to have a rigid case to keep it in.

  Once we’d made some inroads into the food, Mom got really serious.

  “There were some things I was hoping we could talk about tonight.”

  “Okay…” My hackles rose, just a bit, an echo of my old What-now-leave-me-alone defensive reaction, but I took a breath and smoothed them down. We had a chance to get past that, and I didn’t want to screw it up.

  “First, I want to say I’m sorry.” She raised a hand to head off my protest. “No, let me say it. I’ve left you to grow up pretty much on your own these last few years, and I am truly sorry for that. And now here you are, almost ready to fly, and no way for me to go back and do it over. But Lucy, I want you to know too that I’m so proud of you. I know you’ve had a hard road.”

  Okay, and now the tears were back. I looked at the Chiang Mai noodles hanging off my chopsticks and decided they would have to wait.

  “I’m sorry too.” My throat seemed determined not to let me speak, so I stopped there and reached for the iced tea. It seemed enough anyway; my mom gave me a shaky smile and managed a couple more bites before plowing on.

  “So, in other news, Renata, who is on the front desk for the day shift, is quitting. She and her husband are moving out west.”

  Something in her voice told me this wasn’t just small talk. She cleared her throat.

  “I was thinking I’d ask to take over her shift.”

  Wow. I tried to picture what a big change that would be in our lives—my mother home when I got back after school, there for dinner, there through the evening.

  “Really? I thought you didn’t like those early mornings.”

  “I didn’t. But I feel like I’m sleeping better lately. And, more important, I feel like it’s time I rejoined the world—like I want to. You know, have a life, maybe go to a book club or a fitness class, see my friends sometimes.

  “But Lucy, will it drive you crazy having me around all the time? I do want to see more of you, see if we can be a real family again. I just worry that…I know you’re almost eighteen, that I can’t suddenly pick up where I left off three years ago—”

  “Okay, stop,” I said. “I know what you’re saying, and it’s nice of you to ask. But if you want this job, you should definitely take it. Maybe it will drive me crazy sometimes. But I think it will mostly be good. Anyway, don’t worry—I won’t be shy about reminding you that I’m not fifteen anymore.”

  “No.” She laughed. “No, I guess I can count on you for that.”

  “Well then.” I held up my glass, and we clinked. “Here’s to a day job,” I said.

  It wasn’t until Mom asked me how things were going with Jack that I realized he still hadn’t returned my message. He hadn’t answered when I’d phoned after work, so I’d texted him a quick everything okay? I didn’t want to panic—there were lots of reasons not to answer your phone—but I was also pretty sure he’d make a point of reassuring me as soon as he coul
d.

  “Actually, I’m a bit worried about him. He…he wasn’t feeling well today, and his phone’s off. Maybe you could drop me there on the way home?” I hated to lie to her when things were going so well between us, but it was the only realistic option.

  I begged off dessert, saying I’d save it for a big birthday-cake pig-out. I had a bad feeling about Jack, and it was growing stronger by the minute.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  LUCY

  We arrived to find an ambulance in front of the house and the door wide open. Before I jumped out of the car, I told Mom to go home, that I’d call, and then I ran into the house. The living room was so crowded with people I could hardly get a glimpse of Jack. When I did, I got really scared. He was so pale, kind of gray, and he was breathing weird, like he couldn’t get enough air. Worst of all, he wasn’t conscious.

  One medic was fiddling with his arm, and another was holding a bag of IV solution. “How much insulin did you give him?” he asked Bente. She was standing there with one of Jack’s injection pens in her hand, and she answered clearly enough, but she and Jack’s dad both looked shattered.

  “Ten units,” she said. “That should bring him down twenty points, except it’ll take more when he’s this high. I didn’t want to give too much because I thought the IV insulin would work much faster…” She trailed off, her voice starting to quaver like she was afraid she had done something wrong.

  “That’s good,” the medic reassured her. “Okay, here we go, he’s set up. What did you say his reading was?”

  “It was off the meter,” Jack’s dad answered. “Just said HI.”

  “Friendly little devices, aren’t they?” said the other medic, and Jack’s parents tried to smile at the lame joke.

  And then they were lifting Jack onto a stretcher and heading out the door—everyone was—and Jack’s mom noticed me, and when I asked what happened, she said, “We found him like this—we’re just back from Noah’s tournament. His blood sugar’s so high he’s in a coma. But I can’t understand how it happened so fast…”