“He’s in there. He’s in there!” I screamed.
The yard grew brighter from the flames and the lights from the surrounding houses. People started running toward the house, and I heard sirens in the distance. “There’s nothing we can do,” Troy said, gripping me by the shoulders.
I looked down at my hand, at the bright red circle on my palm, and felt the pain. Only the pain. My fingers were still. The itch was gone. Only the burn remained.
Troy was about my height, so he didn’t have to bend down to get on eye level. His eyes were wild. “Delaney, look at me. Run.”
I ran.
I kept running even though I felt a twinge in my rib cage with every deep breath. I didn’t know why I was running or where I was running to, but the look in Troy’s eyes transferred the panic to me. I followed him as he wove between yards, keeping to the shadows. It made sense. What would I tell the police when they came? I left a party and wandered aimlessly around town until I smelled smoke? And if my parents found out that I was out in the cold alone, that would be it for any social life.
I almost ran into Troy when he stopped abruptly at the road. He threw open the passenger side of an old, boxy black car. “Get in,” he said.
We drove. I was crying. I was crying out loud, making these ridiculous hiccuping sounds, and Troy kept glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. I was crying because my hand was burning and throbbing. I was crying because there was a man in that house, a man I had seen at the mall, and I didn’t save him. I was crying because I didn’t know why I had been at that house. And I was crying because Decker had put his hands all over Tara Spano, and I’d never realized how much that would hurt.
Troy parked the car in front of an old brick apartment building. Everyone I knew lived in single-family homes, most with fenced-in yards. This building had a fence, but it was a battered chain-link fence, and it didn’t have a gate anymore. There was a small swing set in the partially enclosed yard, and the metal was coated with dirt and rust.
“Where are we?”
“My place,” Troy said, getting out of the car. “I can’t send you home like this.” I hoped he was talking about my hand, but I thought he was probably talking about the crying. I followed him inside. He didn’t even need a key to open the main door.
The hallway was narrow and musty. A talk show blared from a television nearby. A baby cried somewhere down the hall. I followed him up the wooden steps, holding tight to the railing in case the dilapidated steps gave out.
He unlocked a door on the second floor and chucked his boots across the entrance. Then he stood off to the side, in what was the kitchen, and leaned back against the counter.
I stood in the doorway, not quite in, not quite out. To my right, a brown couch sat across from a small television, separated only by a plywood coffee table. What passed for the kitchen was on my left—a strip of counter with a stove at one end and a refrigerator at the other. Behind the kitchen and the living area, an open door gave me a full view of an unmade bed.
“You live here? Alone?”
“Hey.” He took a tentative step toward me. “I’m not going to hurt you. Come in and shut the door. I’ll drive you home after I treat your burn.” I winced at the word, thinking that there was an old man in a much worse state than me right now.
“You can trust me,” he said, reaching for me.
“I don’t know you.”
“You will,” he said, which could’ve seemed creepy and pushy and threatening. But right then, not trusted by my parents, unwanted by Decker, it seemed like a promise. I stepped inside and shut the door behind me.
“Let’s see the hand,” he said.
I held out my right hand and uncurled my fingers, exposing a throbbing, ugly mess of red and purple.
Troy held my hand in both of his and ran his thumbs along the edge of the burn. “Second degree. Just barely. You’ll be fine. You’ve been through far worse, right?” He let go of me and ran the water in the sink. He plugged the bottom and let the water rise.
“Put your hand in here and let it soak for a while.” While I did that, he busied himself in the kitchen. “Thirsty? Hungry?” I shook my head. He pulled out a soda anyway and popped the lid. I took it in my good hand.
“I need your jacket. You reek of smoke.” I let him help me out of it, lifting my hand out of the water as he pulled off the other sleeve. He sprayed it with an aerosol can and hung it over the back of a chair.
He brought a dishrag over and pulled my arm out of the sink. He started dabbing at my hand gently. The throbbing had decreased, but it stung every time he touched me. Then Troy looked me in the eyes and leaned forward. He took my hair in his hand and brought it to his face. “Your hair is all smoky,” he said, very, very close.
I took a step back. “I was at a party. It’s okay.” If my parents asked, maybe I could say there was a bonfire or something.
He walked a few feet down his hall and entered his bathroom. I heard him rummage around in the cabinets. He came out with a bottle of antibiotic ointment. “This should help,” he said, “but the good stuff is at my work.” He poured the cream onto his fingers and tapped it onto the palm of my hand. Then he wound a piece of cloth around my burn and tied it loosely. He didn’t move away, though. His hand slid from my palm to my wrist to my elbow.
“I need to go home.”
Troy let me go. “I work at the Glencreek Assisted Living Facility. You know where that is?”
“No.”
“You know Johnny’s Pizzeria?”
Everyone knew Johnny’s. “Yes.”
“Okay, it’s around the corner from there. I’ll be working all day tomorrow. Come by and I’ll treat the wound right.”
“Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve.”
“Old people don’t stop being old on holidays.” He helped me shrug on my jacket, and we left. There were so many things I wanted to say on the way home. Why were we both there? What happened inside? Why did we run? But I didn’t say anything because I had a feeling I already knew the answer.
I was there because the old man was dying. Same way I was drawn to the hospital room when that patient was dying. Same way I was chasing shadows in Mrs. Merkowitz’s yard the night she died. I gasped.
“You know where I live.”
“I do,” he said as he navigated the streets without instruction and parked at my curb.
“I saw you that night. At my neighbor’s house.”
Troy’s jaw tensed, and he barely moved his lips when he spoke. “I didn’t think you did.”
“I only saw your shadow.”
The corners of his mouth turned up, but it wasn’t a smile. “That’s all I really am.”
Decker’s car was already in his driveway. I hoped he hadn’t stopped by to check on me. God, how would I explain this to my parents?
“Delaney? You’ll come tomorrow, right?”
“I’ll come tomorrow,” I said. I pulled the sleeves of my jacket far past my hands so my parents wouldn’t see the damage.
They were waiting up in the living room. Mom was at the window. “Who was that?”
“Troy.”
“Who’s Troy? I’ve never heard of any Troy.” If that’s all she wanted to know, then Decker hadn’t come over after the party. And really, why would he?
“Dad met him at the mall.”
“Oh. Is there something you want to tell us about this Troy?”
“No, Mom.” There was nothing I wanted to tell them about Troy. Just some guy who knew when people were going to die. Same as me.
She chased up the stairs after me. “You look upset, honey.”
I was upset. I was drawn to an old man I didn’t know, at the mall and at his home. And he died. I didn’t save him.
“Did something happen at the party?”
I winced, the memories of Decker and Tara kissing tumbling back.
“I have heartburn,” I said.
“Oh. I’ll get you some medicine.”
I wanted to ask
her for my pain pills, too, but they were buried under the snacks in Decker’s car. She returned in under a minute with the perfect antidote to excess stomach acid. Mom liked to fix things, so I gave her something fixable to focus on.
Chapter 9
The first thing I did when Mom left the room was wash my hair. I held my injured right hand out of the water and scrubbed the smoke out of my hair with my left hand. I never appreciated the use of both hands until I couldn’t use one.
When I got back to my room, a sleeping pill rested with a cup of water on my bedside table. I pushed Les Misérables to the side of my desk and booted up my laptop. Headaches kept me from reading the small print in my books. Now, because of my burned hand, I couldn’t even write. But I had other ways to keep busy.
I zoomed in on the laptop screen, tripling the font size. I scanned through articles of inexplicable science. Brains that knew more than we thought capable. Stories of animals sensing death. Civilizations untouched by technology that could somehow sense impending danger.
I searched for brain disorders and stumbled upon an article for synesthesia, a condition responsible for a rewiring of senses. I read about people who see symphonies and taste words. Who think a C-sharp is red and an A-flat is blue. Who think “happy” tastes salty and “sky” tastes like meatloaf. I think “death” tastes like Swiss cheese. Sharp and dry and pungent.
Could that have happened to my brain? Did neurons forge new paths, cross each other, register in different areas? Was the ability to sense death buried inside everyone? Maybe people just didn’t know how to tap into it. Had I become more than any human should ever be?
And how had Troy tapped into this ability?
I typed “Troy Varga” into the search engine. I got hit after hit of social networking pages, though none of the pictures looked like him. I got high school sporting events highlights. I read the details, compared the years to his age, came up empty. I scanned the grainy pictures for any of his likeness. And even though my head had officially begun to hurt, I kept going.
I found him at three a.m. A team baseball photo. He was darker. He wore pinstripes. He leaned on a bat. He smiled an open smile I hadn’t seen before. He was blurry, his features undefined, but I could see the blue of his eyes. It was him. I looked at the source. San Diego Gazette, three years ago. The headline, “Shelton Oaks Wins the Championship.”
I closed my eyes and flashed back to the first time I saw Troy in the library. How I asked whether he knew about comas. I remembered what Janna said about printing the names of minors in the paper, so I tried a new search. “San Diego, Shelton Oaks, coma.”
There was only one link, and it was over two years old. FAMILY FOUND IN DITCH. I almost couldn’t bring myself to click on it.
47-year-old Jay Varga and his wife, Nancy, 46, were found dead in their car off of Hutton Road yesterday afternoon. Their daughter, Sharon, 21, was pronounced dead at the hospital from massive blood loss. They were reported missing earlier in the day when their son, a junior at Shelton Oaks, failed to show up for school for the third consecutive day and attempts to reach the family were unsuccessful. The son remains in a coma.
With shaking hands, I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out the scrap of paper with Troy’s number. I dialed. It rang four times before Troy’s gravelly voice answered. “Hello?” Why had I called? What would I say? “Hello? Anyone there? Delaney?” I slammed the phone down hard.
I was wrong. We weren’t anything greater. We had been damaged. Fragmented. Something less. Strip the brain bare, down to its primitive form. This is what remains.
I never did get to sleep that night. All I could think about was death. The smell of smoke. The color of flames. The burn throbbing in the center of my hand. And a cane on fire. In my memory, it bubbled like flesh.
I didn’t see Decker Saturday morning. His car was there and then it was gone and then it was there, but I never saw him. He didn’t call. To be fair, I didn’t call him either.
I couldn’t stand to be in my room anymore. I couldn’t look at my computer without thinking about Troy and his dead family and him living alone in that crappy apartment. I couldn’t look at all the ribbons on my walls without thinking how pointless it all was. And that stupid book, Les Misérables, lay on my desk untouched, stuck on page forty-three. A painfully obvious metaphor for everything about me and Decker. Our relationship: abandoned. Our friendship: broken, like the spine. Everything wrong.
I walked down to the kitchen. “Can I borrow your car?” Mom tensed over the sink. The water continued dripping and water overflowed from the cups.
“The roads are still icy,” she said to the drain, “and you haven’t driven in a while. And with your ribs, your range of motion may be decreased.”
I twisted gently back and forth, but she wasn’t looking. “Want me to do a back bend?” Not that I could. Actually, I was probably fine as long as I didn’t do a back bend.
She placed her hands on opposite sides of the sink and looked upward. “I want you to live.”
“I am. Look, I’ll be really careful. I’ll drive under the speed limit. Promise I won’t die.”
Mom turned to look at me, her face pale, her worry lines pronounced. “I’m not sure which way will guarantee I won’t lose you. Overbearing or underbearing.”
“That’s not a word,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“My father,” she began. She cleared her throat and started again. “My father was overbearing. That’s what your dad is worried about.” She looked out the side window. “But my mother, she was underbearing. She didn’t care. And that was worse.” She ran her hand along the edge of the countertop.
“Mom—” I tried to stop her because it turned out I didn’t really want to know. I didn’t want to hear it.
“Your dad thinks I left home because of my father. He was awful, it’s true. He’d lose it over the smallest thing—the way I emptied the dishwasher, the way I left clothes hanging over the end of the hamper, anything. It was hell.” I looked around the kitchen, so perfect, so orderly, and saw something else besides cleanliness. Compulsion. Fear. She continued, “But that’s not why I left. It was my mother. She watched, she did nothing, she didn’t defend me, she didn’t take me and leave. She was just complicit. And that was far, far worse.”
We didn’t speak for a long time, just listened to the water collect in the sink and escape down the drain in spurts.
“Maybe you should aim for something in between.”
“That’s what I used to do, and look what happened,” she said. She turned back to the sink and picked up the sponge. And then, “Be back in time for church.”
She seemed calm when she said it, but on my way out the door, I heard her rummaging frantically around the kitchen.
I drove past the strip of town with the pizzeria and found Troy’s work easily. I didn’t even need directions. I just followed the pull, the gentle tug past the pizza shop and the movie theater and the bank around the curve to Glencreek Assisted Living. I parked along the curb across the street, right in front of a small graveyard. I looked back and forth across the street. Assisted living, graveyard, assisted living, graveyard. Well, that was convenient. Trees curved inward over Glencreek. The tips of the branches stretched downward, reaching toward me, trying to scratch my surface. I ducked lower even though I knew they were well out of reach.
A chunky woman with dark hair sat behind the front desk, scribbling determinedly on multiple charts. One earbud dangled by her side, blaring jazz music, while her head nodded along to the beat from the one lodged in her ear. She pulled the other earbud out when she saw me.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Troy Varga.”
She looked me over. “Of course you are. He should be finishing up his rounds. You can wait in the lobby at the end of the hall.” I strode down the main hall, a trail of slush left in my wake. I felt the tug at each closed door as I walked down the hall. Some were faint, just a sugg
estion, some were stronger. This place was full of dying people. But my fingers were steady. My brain was clear. No one was dying right now.
The pull was strongest at the last door. I mustered up my willpower to bypass it, but I paused anyway at the open door. An old woman was propped up, coughing into a beige, kidney-shaped basin, while a man in blue scrubs rubbed her back. She looked up at me briefly and started hacking again.
Blue scrubs turned around. Troy. He looked like he was in as much pain as the old woman. He continued to rub the woman’s back until her coughing subsided, then he eased her back and placed a thin oxygen tube under her nose. “I’ll be back after lunch.” She closed her eyes.
He walked out the door and shut it behind him. “Come with me,” he said by way of greeting. He walked across the hall and pulled us into a supply closet. Pitch darkness washed over us until he pulled a cord over our heads, illuminating a dim yellow lightbulb.
He looked through the contents on the metal wire shelves while I pressed myself against the other wall, which wasn’t very far away at all. “Okay, let’s see.”
I rolled up my long sleeve, which I’d let dangle down to my fingertips. He untied the cloth and took my hand in his. “Not too bad,” he said, even though it looked worse than yesterday, blistery and puffy and angry. He dabbed some prescription-strength cream on my hand. I looked away, thinking it would hurt less if I didn’t see it.
Then he placed some loose gauze over it and taped it to the back of my hand. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Troy.” I looked right at him and spoke in a whisper. “Did you ever tell a doctor about this?”
He frowned and straightened the already uniform boxes on the shelves. “Why would I do that?”
“I’ve been thinking that it’s neurological.”
Troy laughed, still not looking at me. “I don’t think so.”
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