Of Scars and Stardust

by Andrea Hannah

  He propped himself up in bed and flinched as the IV tube wiggled in his hand. He slowly, carefully, reached for my wrist and flipped it over, like I was the one cut up and fragile. His finger traced over a rectangle of tiny freckles that spilled onto my palm from my wrist. “Here’s the dipper part of the Big Dipper,” he said as he touched each freckle. Then he slid his finger across the pink scar left behind from my blood oath with Rae. “And this is the handle.”

  I touched the scar. “A long time ago, Rae made me promise her that I would never tell anyone where she was going. We made a blood oath.” I watched him carefully as I said it. “I still don’t know why she did it with a knife and not a needle or something less … violent.”

  “Rae always did have a flare for the dramatic.” Grant sighed as he touched the scar again. He glanced up at me. “Did you keep your promise?”

  I thought about the days after, the way Dad used to scare me just by looking at me. How he probably knew I could have told him where Rae was, but I wouldn’t. How I finally told that Ryan guy, when I was being interrogated about Ella, because I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “No,” I said. “Only for a few days.” All of a sudden, I felt the weight of the time bomb ticking on my chest. The second hand was ticking louder, echoing in the space between us, warning me. I had to go if I wanted a future outside of Havenwood, outside of Amble. With Grant.

  But did Grant want a future with me?

  I sucked in a breath. “Grant, I have to go. And I don’t think I’m coming back.” I forced the next part out of my mouth: “I don’t know if we’ll see each other again.”

  Something behind Grant’s eyes flickered, a tiny spark of recognition. Or maybe it was fear. Whatever it was, it was quickly dimmed by the pain medication dripping through his IV. He blinked for so long that I wasn’t sure whether he’d fallen asleep.

  “Grant?” I touched the tips of his fingers.

  He started back to life and shook his head. And then he wove his fingers through mine. “Can you keep a promise to me?”

  I bit my lip as I watched the way his fingers bent around mine. It seemed like it would be such a weird mix: my toothpick fingers all tied up in his long, rough ones. But somehow they looked okay together, like his hands were meant to be big enough to swallow mine up and cover them from the cold. And I thought about the one other promise I’d ever made, the most important one: to keep Ella safe.

  I hadn’t kept that one.

  “Can you at least try, Claire?” Grant asked as he squeezed my fingers. “Sometimes promises don’t work out the way you want them to. But the most important thing is that you at least gave it your best shot.”

  The fact that he was even talking to me right now, even though his words were kind of slurred from whatever was dripping through his IV, was a miracle to me. The fact that he even wanted to talk to me was another miracle.

  “I can try,” I told him.

  Grant swallowed and tipped his head toward the ceiling. He took a deep breath. “How did I even get here?”

  His torn-up face in the photographs flashed through my brain again. I closed my eyes. “I found you in the cornfield,” I whispered. It was the truth, as much of it as I could keep from slipping between my fingers anyway. I’d found Grant in the cornfield, injured before I got there. And then the wolf.

  And then the knife.

  His voice cut through the images in my head. “Can you promise me that if I leave with you right now, we’ll make it out of Amble before anything … happens to us?”

  I looked at him—all of him—for the first time since I’d stepped in this room. Dozens of stitches screamed at me from under his bandages, every last one of them possibly my fault.

  “I don’t know.” I pulled myself from the edge of his bed. “I don’t remember how everything happened. I just found you in the field and your head was bleeding and I don’t even know—”

  “Claire, are you capable of hurting me right now?”

  I looked at him and what used to be left of his Big Dipper nose, and everything in me melted. “No,” I whispered.

  He nodded once. And then he tugged the IV needle out of his hand without flinching.

  I tried to breath. “Are you sure you want to leave with me? What about your job, your mom, your friends. Your future?”

  Grant shook his head as if he were trying to shake out the remnants of the pain medication from his brain. “I don’t have a future here anymore. You know how Amble is. They never forget when you betray them.” He touched my cheek. “And there’s not really a future without you in it, anyway.”

  My chest exploded with something like happiness, or maybe just utter fear. Everything about Grant looked unstable, from the slur between his lips to the cloudiness behind his eyes. I wasn’t sure if he meant what he said or if he just wanted out of that hospital bed, but there had to be some part of him that still trusted me under all those narcotics if he was willing to go with me.

  Right?

  I didn’t give him a chance to change his mind. “We’ve gotta hurry,” I said as I grabbed his arm.

  Grant ripped the heart monitor off his finger and pulled himself up. As soon as he stood, his knees buckled and I almost tumbled down with him. “Sorry,” he murmured, and he sounded way more messed up than I’d thought. “They put something strong in that IV.”

  I pulled him up and opened the door. My heart sank when I saw the cluster of hospital employees puttering around the nurses’ station. “How are we going to get out of here?” I whispered.

  “Ella,” Grant said, like it was the most obvious thing in the word.

  Warmth flooded over me like an exploding sun and I gasped. Ella. Of course. Her diary entries. The secret escape route in the hospital when she came here for speech therapy.

  I nodded. “Come on, I know where to go.”

  thirty-seven

  We slipped through the door and straight into a stairwell across the hall. Ella’s speech therapy used to be down the hall adjacent to Grant’s room, so if I had to guess, this was the stairwell she’d written about in her diary. At least, it had to be, because this was our only option.

  “Do you remember what Ella wrote?” Grant said as soon as the heavy metal door shut behind us. “Because there’s a security station at the bottom of these stairs.”

  “I remember. There was something in there about how they do rounds every twenty minutes.”

  Grant nodded. “Then let’s hope and pray for the best.”

  I started down the stairs, two at a time, and felt Grant just behind me until I reached the last step. When I turned around, he was still halfway up the stairs with his palm pressed to his side.

  “What’s wrong?” I said as I started back up the stairs.

  “I’m … fine.” He sucked in a breath. “I just … this one hurts.” He tugged at his hospital gown until I could the outline of a bandage wrapped around his rib cage. Speckles of blood had started to seep through the layers of fabric.

  I touched his side. “We don’t have to—”

  “No.” He shook his head. “No. Let’s go.”

  I pulled his hand into mine and led him the rest of the way down the stairs. When we got to the bottom, I pulled open the door and poked my head out.

  The security station was empty.

  I couldn’t even begin to believe my luck, especially since I was never lucky. I grabbed Grant’s hand. “We’re going to have to run for the side door, past the receptionists’ desk.”

  He squeezed my fingers. “I can do it.”

  “Okay,” I breathed. “Let’s go.”

  I heard nothing but Grant’s hitched breathing behind me. I felt nothing but his sweaty palm on my scarred one. Even when a voice rained down on us from the ceiling speakers, I only heard Grant’s words, saying: “Go, go, go!”

  I shoved my shoulder into the d
oor and flew into the parking lot, my hand still tucked in Grant’s. The light, which had looked like a beacon less than an hour ago, leered down at us now and threatened to tell everyone our secret.

  “Where do we go?” Grant huffed from behind me. His fingers slipped from mine as he bent over to clutch at his side.

  I glanced up at the cornfield stretched between here and Grant’s house. “We need to get your truck. And then we go north.”

  Grant lifted his head and I had to look away. I couldn’t look at the pain that had snaked its way into every line on his face and every fleck of green in his eyes. He coughed once and then pulled himself up. “Okay. Let’s go.” And he started jogging.

  I followed him as the lights strobed over us. And when we hit the edge of the parking lot and made our way toward the road that cut through the cornfield, I followed the sound of his heavy breathing.

  I followed. But this time, I followed because I made the choice to. Because I knew that being with Grant was the path to a future that made sense. Because I loved him.

  I love him.

  For a long time, we didn’t speak. Nothing twitched in the sinking stalks, only the stars hovering over us breathed in their own little universe, while we breathed in ours.

  I didn’t even think about the wolves, or finding Ella, or how Dad was most definitely going to lose his job and his reputation over this. I just listened to my own heart thumping under my ribs, Grant’s breath pulsing in and out of his lungs in quick bursts, and the crunch of the pavement under my feet; Grant’s feet were still wrapped in hospital socks.

  Porch lights began to pop up on the other side of the cornfield like lightning bugs flickering to life. We turned down the dirt road that led to Grant’s truck and our only shot of getting out of here together.

  Then he jerked to a stop in front of me and I slammed into him—hard. His knees buckled and we both fell to the frozen road.

  “Grant.” Panic rose in my throat. “What happened? Can you get up?”

  He rolled onto his back. Both of his hands were pressed to his side, and they were both covered in blood. “I think my stitches broke,” he groaned.

  There was so much more blood than I thought could be possible from a quick graze of wolf’s teeth or a swipe of a claw. My head was fuzzy; everything smelled like metal.

  I breathed into my sweater. “Let me see.”

  Carefully, I pulled up the side of Grant’s hospital gown and pulled back the soaked bandage.

  A wound that looked like a gaping mouth sliced across Grant’s rib cage. It was so deep that its center was purplish and puffy with blood.

  It was the exact width of a small knife.

  My brain felt itchy, like there was a sharp piece of memory still stuck there: the weight of the knife in my hand, the way my muscles felt when I tore through the wolf’s skin.

  Maybe it wasn’t the wolf’s skin.

  I pressed my scarred palm against Grant’s open cut. “It should’ve been you,” I breathed.

  I listened to his shallow breaths for a while before he finally said, “What?” His words were so soft that if the night wasn’t so still they would have been swallowed up by the wind.

  “I should have made a blood oath with you, not Rae.” The tears came, hot and fast, and they felt more like goodbye tears than sad tears. Not because I thought Grant was going to die here due to broken stitches, but because I somehow knew that my time was up.

  “What would you have promised?” he asked softly. The tips of his fingers touched the edge of my palm.

  Just then, the cluster of stalks behind Grant twitched to life. I gasped.

  They twitched again, and at the same time something snapped from the other side of the road. A shadow slipped through the stalks until its pricked ears and yellow eyes materialized next to Grant. He let a strangled little cry and clutched his side. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  There was the rustling sound again, and when I turned around there were more wolves: some scrawny and wiry, some so solid I wondered how they’d hidden in a half-rotted cornfield for so long. A low growl vibrated in the throat of the yellow-eyed wolf.

  I turned back to it, lifted both of my palms still slick with Grant’s blood. “Please, don’t,” I begged.

  The wolf’s nostrils flared as its eyes bounced between the blood on my hands and Grant’s pained face. And then it snapped before I had time to even think.

  Bone to bone, teeth on skin.

  Warmth that bubbled and dripped from my shattered scar.

  It was a solid three seconds before I realized I was screaming.

  That Grant was screaming too.

  I dropped my face to his chest and pressed my broken hand to his rib cage.

  And I waited. And sobbed out the words to “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” Because there was nothing left to try for, nothing left to do but wait.

  Their breath curdled around us, hot and urgent and wanting. From behind my eyelids, I could see the flash of lights, probably the reflection of the stars in their eyes. There was the howling that sounded like sirens.

  There were claws that felt like fingers around my arms, and teeth that felt like handcuffs. And there was Grant’s voice, muffled and far away as my body was ripped from his.

  And then there was darkness.

  thirty-eight

  It’s strange, but sometimes I miss the cold.

  I miss the bite of winter wind against my neck, the delicate spiderwebs of ice stretched across the windowpanes. But mostly I just miss the open, empty sky and the whir of bike tires as I ride through the cornfields.

  But there are plenty of things to like about spring, too.

  I stretch out on my blanket so the grass tickles the soles of my bare feet. People are watching me as they pass by—so many people, more people in this park than in all of Amble combined. Every once in a while, one of them will give me a strange look as they walk by, or mumble a string of syllables under their breath. But then someone in a white coat sweeps them away, toward a cluster of buildings at the back of the park and I’m alone again. I know these people think it’s weird that I’m already barefoot in April, when the air still nips at their skin. But they haven’t been to a place as cold as Amble.

  I flip onto my stomach and check my cell phone: 11:31 a.m. I have an appointment with Dr. Barges in a half hour.

  Now that I’m back in Manhattan, I see him three times a week instead of one. That was part of my plea agreement back in Ohio: regular, intensive therapy sessions, a structured program, and the right medication.

  Even then, sometimes I still see them.

  I’ll be on my way to Dr. Barges’ office and I’ll see a flash of gray tucked between the skyscrapers. Every once in a while, I’ll hear a howl.

  But just as quickly as they try to take over my brain, the Clozapine washes them away and they disappear. Dr. Barges explained to me that Clozapine has a ridiculously high success rate in treating hallucinations. So far, it works.

  Dad wasn’t as lucky.

  Because his psychotic episodes started so many years ago, his body eventually became immune to the effects of Clozapine. He started to see their gem-colored eyes and smell their hot, sour breath again. He started to hear them howl.

  But he didn’t tell anyone, not until he told me, and not until he was too late. So an innocent snow angel lost her life to wolves and Dad lost his to a guilty verdict and a lifetime of inpatient treatment at Havenwood.

  I dip my toes in the grass and pull a notebook from my messenger bag. I open the cover and a slip of paper falls out. A note.

  From Ella.

  I unfold it, careful not to smear the colored ink inside. Her loopy handwriting sprawls across the paper, heart-dotted letters and all.

  I’m coming.

  My face breaks into the grin as I clutch the note to my chest. Ella sent this one
to me, along with a copy of her train schedule, two weeks ago. My heart still throbs with happiness when I imagine greeting her at Grand Central Station, throwing my arms around her and breathing in her magic. I play it over and over in my mind, every day.

  Three more days.

  When Ella heard that Dad had been placed under psychiatric care in Havenwood after pulling the insanity card, and that I’d started treatment in New York, she took the first train back to Ohio to be with Mom. As it turns out, I’d missed the biggest clue of all in my search for Ella.

  That postcard, pinned to the center of her corkboard: Welcome to Madison, Wisconsin!

  Patrick’s cousins lived in Madison. Ella had met them at the bus stop in Marquette, and they took her the rest of the way to Wisconsin. Safe from wolves with knife teeth and free from a small town clotted with broken dreams.

  The first time we talked on the phone, she told me she knew I’d find the diaries, that she left them behind to explain why she couldn’t stay. Then she apologized a million and a half times for the entries, especially the ones that bit at me with her anger. But I don’t even care about that anymore—I have her back.

  Sometimes I think about asking her about the night of the attack, about the minutes before and the hours after. About what she really remembers. I tried to bring it up once, but Ella just quickly switched to the subject of Patrick’s new basset hound.

  So we don’t talk about those kinds of things.

  It’s probably for the best.

  I turn to a fresh page in my notebook. A journal, actually. Dr. Barges gave it to me when I first arrived back in New York. It’s just a flimsy little thing, nothing special like the gold-eyed wolf journal that Grant gave me. There’s gold on this one too, but it’s in the form of a pressed-in seal with a tree in the center and the words Central Park Sanatorium wrapped around the branches. Dr. Barges suggested I start using it to keep track of any relapses. Sometimes I do that, but mostly I just write letters to Grant.

  I like to imagine what it would be like if he were here with me, living in New York instead of back in Amble. I tap my pencil to my lip. Today, Grant would be reading the paper and shoveling wobbly eggs into his mouth at the diner next to my apartment. I’d be watching him from across the table, wondering when was the next time I could kiss him like I wanted to without getting weird looks from strangers.