by Tom Deitz
A further scan yielded more familiar faces. Alec’s folks: Dr. McLean and his wife, Geraldine; the one beaming, the other nursing secret grudges that his son’s English grades had kept him out of either top spot. Gary’s dad was there too, the former race car driver who now ran the BMW dealership in MacTyrie that somehow found enough retired rich expatriate Atlantans to stay afloat, but who found himself spinning wrenches as often as pitching sales. And there was Darrell’s family: Myra the artist, and his mom, who taught business at MacTyrie J.C. and nursed on the side, while his lanky dad managed the athletic program and coached tennis.
And, wonder of wonders, there was Aikin’s forest-ranger father and his mother the archaeologist, together for only the third time David had ever seen them so (their respective careers demanded they live apart, though they were madly in love with each other). There were others too: friends who had graduated previous years, younger folks watching older brothers and sisters pass out of their lives, eager for their own places in the sun.
But one face was missing. David studied the rows and aisles again, having now come to the third of the four points he had planned. No, there she was, way in the back, making her way as unobtrusively as she could down the aisle to squeeze in by his ma: his lady, Liz Hughes. Lord, she looked good—red hair cut so that it resembled feathers, short on top but past her shoulders on back and sides; medium-blue dress accented with lace and patterned with flowers.
He grinned in spite of himself, and continued, “Now I don’t want you to think that I’ve got all the answers, or even think I’ve got all the answers or maybe even suspect that I’ve got all the answers. But I’ve got a heap of questions that ought to keep me busy for a while, and I hope the rest of my classmates will have, too; ’cause I’ve seen too many of us go out and get old in two years. I…” He paused, blinking, staring at Mike Wheeler in the fourth row, who had just shot a rubber band at him. He ignored Mike, his nemesis of the last twelve years, and looked back at Liz. She was gazing at him, too; but then he saw her start, squint up at the ceiling as if searching for something among the steel I-beams. The lights dimmed abruptly, browning out as the power station at the edge of town shunted in different lines. Suddenly he realized it was raining—raining hard. Probably it had been for a while, but the new auditorium was so well insulated, he hadn’t really noticed.
But he did notice when the lights went out entirely and lightning flashed outside, strobing the room stark white. Normality returned before he could say anything stupid, though; and he heaved a sigh of relief, grateful he was nearly done. Behind him he could hear Dr. Taylor fidgeting nervously.
“And so in conclusion,” he went on quickly, “I’ll say something that’s been said many, many times before, but only ’cause it’s true, and only ’cause I’ve decided it really is what I ought to say: Today is the end; but it’s the beginnin’ too, and no one knows what the future holds. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen; and apologies to you, Dr. Taylor, and to our class sponsors, for springin’ this on you, but I guess I’ve got a nickname to live up to, and I wouldn’t want to let anybody down. Thank you again.”
And with that he returned to his seat.
“Good job,” Barbara whispered beside him, but he scarcely noticed. The school superintendent was addressing them now, and then would come the alma mater and the conferring of diplomas. In the meanwhile, he sought out Liz. She was still there, but something was definitely wrong: her face had gone blank, as if she were a thousand miles away. He saw her blink, shake her head, saw his ma speaking to her, almost certain the words were “Are you okay?” The worst thing was he couldn’t go to her. She was sensitive, he knew: able to take herself out of herself sometimes; able to get impressions, feelings—even images—from inanimate things. Scrying, it was called, searching for something with part of that thing as a focus. Then he realized, to his horror, that she still had his ring: the ring Oisin had given him years ago, that was still a part of Faerie, though it no longer held any magic.
But it could still be a focus, couldn’t it? And war was probably raging in Faerie and leaking though into this World as weather, and maybe as dreams and emotions, too. That was what was causing the rain, he was positive now—and he bet Liz had somehow picked up on it, because her face was white as bone. He knew too that if he tried, he could probably key into it as well: simply let his mind go blank and see the war, like he had earlier that day at the lake. But he didn’t want to. What he wanted to do was to tend to his lady.
Barbara elbowed him back to reality. “Wake up, Davy,” she whispered. “It’s almost time.”
The power flickered twice more during the superintendent’s address and once again during the F.F.A. band’s spirited electric rendition of the school song, which was set to the tune of the “Battle of New Orleans” and began, “In 1925, a ’possum took a trip… And then, right after Dr. Taylor had asked them all to rise and the first row had made their way into the wings, the room blacked out entirely and stayed that way. There were shouts for a moment, and one scream, and a series of uneasy whispers, then silence as, for no clear reason, five hundred people listened to the pounding of rain on the flat tar roof and watched a mad laser show of lightning cavort across the parking lot like some enormous carnival ride gone wild.
David closed his eyes, tried to tune out the sound—and gradually heard the rumble of thunder change to cries of rage and madness and the bellowing of beasts as he abruptly found himself witness to a battle raging in Faerie. Finvarra’s forces had conjured a tornado to flatten Lugh’s host, who had sheltered in a holly grove, and Lugh’s druids were fighting back with a twister of their own, to which they had added balls of ever-burning fire. But the worst thing, the ever-present thing, was the water: water falling so hard it was like endless sheeting needles of cold steel, stabbing both earth and flesh with more fury than he could imagine. He was in someone else’s body, he realized: a woman’s this time, and she had fallen, was drowning, but just as that dawned on him he came back to himself.
Somehow he was standing. Blinking. The lights were on, though fitfully, and he could hear the whine of the auxiliary generators coming on line beneath the floor.
“Evelyn Anita Adams,” Dr. Taylor intoned shakily, and David saw a short, chubby girl slump across the stage. “Angus Darrell Buchanan,” the litany continued, as the audience slowly relaxed. “Aikin Carlisle Daniels…Gary Madison Hudson…Alexander Marion McLean…Annabella Thurmond…Christina McKenzie Walls…Ronald Ezekial Zukowski.”
And at last (which pissed David off a little), the three honor students who remained on the stage. “Barbara Ann Justus…Nathanial Samson Berrong…David Kevin Sullivan,” and he was walking across the stage again, shaking Dr. Taylor’s hand mechanically, taking the scroll bound in burgundy-and-silver ribbon, pausing at the end of the stage to flip his silver tassel to the other side of his mortarboard before returning to his seat.
Music started immediately, the F.F.A. band doing the march from Star Wars, of all things. As one his classmates rose and processed out. But David barely remembered it. All he could think of was seeing Liz, telling her what was up, seeing if she was okay.
Somehow it was over.
All but the worry and the rain.
*
David was not prepared for the postpartum chaos that greeted him after the ceremony. One moment he was walking down the aisle trying to feel more like the Luke Skywalker the music suggested and less like the smirking shorter-than-average high school kid wearing goofy-looking regalia he was certain was the image he projected; the next, he found himself literally in over his head with bodies. Shoulders, necks, faces swelled up around him, almost stifling him as he tried to force his way to the less-crowded fringes of the hall outside the auditorium. Once he saw his mother’s blonde hair, Uncle Dale’s weathered, angular visage, but then Alec had grabbed him by the shoulders and was steering him onward while Gary thrust his muscular torso through the crowd, fiancée in tow.
A hand reached out to him, a
nother voice called congratulations. An elderly great-aunt stopped him to kiss him and shake his hand and tell him how good he looked, how proud she was of him.
But where was Liz? He had to find her, find her fast, discover what was going on with her, see if it was anything like what had happened to him.
Suddenly he was alone, his friends whisked away by the same extended-family clangor that he knew he should also be seeking. He stopped, stood on tip-toes, scanning the crowd, aware of the smell of oiled boards and the gleam of trophy cases to either side of the semicircular entrance lobby. A flash of white proved to be Uncle Dale’s hair, and he started that way, found his folks just as the mob eddied away, with Little Billy running on ahead, grinning from ear to ear.
And there Liz was, matching his brother’s grin, but with trouble in her eyes. He tried to grin back, took his mortarboard in one hand and bowed low in a Cavalier bow. The grin widened.
“’Bout time,” he teased when she had come near enough to hear him above the din.
“Sorry I was late,” she panted. “It took me forever to get over the mountain. Had to stop three times ’cause I couldn’t see, and the car nearly drowned out twice. Jesus, David, is it ever gonna stop raining?”
He did not reply immediately, simply gazed fondly at her. A lot had changed in the nine months they’d been an official couple. They’d passed the stage where all they did was make out, the one where all they did was talk. They had reached the level of intuition where they could dispense with casual conversation and cut to the matter at hand.
Liz drew her eyes away uncharacteristically, swallowed, then looked at him again, managing to restore the grin.
He raised an eyebrow.
She giggled. “Sorry…I…I know we need to talk, but…gee, I can’t help being caught up in the moment.”
He blushed furiously, started to unzip the gown.
She stopped him, fished in her purse for a camera. “No Davy, not yet. I want to remember this: you in your regalia, and probably not for the last time.”
“Christ!” David grunted, rolling his eyes. But he dutifully allowed himself to be positioned before a relatively blank wall. His ma and pa had crowded around, but Little Billy was off looking at trophies.
“I thought I was done with pictures this afternoon,” he growled, thinking of the half-hour session at home, with him in every variation of kith and kin united by him in the foolish nylon gown. Synthetic renditions of Renaissance clothing juxtaposed with hi-tech haircuts and a late-nineteenth-century farmhouse thrown in for background was a little too mixed a metaphor for him, though he was probably the only person he knew who would have noticed the incongruity.
Three flash cubes later he was finally allowed to shrug out of the cap and gown, which he delivered to Little Billy who promptly donned the mortarboard. The diploma he surrendered to his pa with a mumbled comment about him having helped finance it, but his ma promptly snatched it from her husband’s startled hands and stashed it in her purse along with the three honor scrolls he handed her next: one for being Star Student, one for being a National Merit Scholar, and a third for winning the Strickland prize for best English student.
The crowd was thinning now, folks wandering down the steps and out onto the porch where they peered up at the streaming skies and wondered what was the best way to get to their vehicles. Not a few men were dispatched with umbrellas to fetch rides as close as possible for their not-so-foresightful kin.
Aikin rushed up, his gray-green eyes bright with merriment behind their thick lenses. “Hey, Mad Guy, you coming to G-Man’s party?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” David replied with forced enthusiasm, then glanced quizzically at Liz. “Uh…but we may be a little late.”
“Be there or be square,” Aikin chided, bouncing away to search for his own lady.
David’s parents were backing away. “You going to that party then?” Jo Anne asked.
“I told you before I was, and yeah, I’ll be careful, and”—he glanced at his pa—“I won’t have anything to drink.”
Big Billy shrugged. “You’re a man now, gotta make your own decisions—ain’t that what you just said? ’Sides, I thought Miss Lizzy was drivin’.”
“She is,” David acknowledged, recalling the skirmish he’d had with his ego earlier that day when he’d been torn between doing the macho thing and taking his Mustang, and the rational thing, which was to let Liz drive. Good sense had won out—to a point, since it was a fact that the M-of-D was a real handful in the kind of rain they’d been having lately. Liz’s little Ford EXP, by contrast, did nicely in the wet, as long as you didn’t go too fast, which she wouldn’t do. Still, it felt a little weird being chauffeured to his own graduation bash.
“Catch you tomorrow, then,” Big Billy called with surprising cheerfulness, then ushered his clan away.
Uncle Dale lingered for a moment and stuck out his hand. “Congratulations, boy,” he said. “I’ll give you my speech later, right now’s your hour. You go and have fun with your friends—but be careful. Seems to me there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye.” He wagged his ragged brows skyward and winked knowingly.
David nodded back and took off his tie, stuffing it in his pocket. His final act at Enotah County High was to seek out good old locker #301 and remove the duffle bag he’d stashed there. While Liz watched in some amusement, he exchanged his tight new shoes for his comfy sneakers.
“So,” he said when he had finished and the two of them were padding down the now-almost-deserted hall toward the entrance, “what happened back there?”
Liz’s hand tightened in his, and her breath caught. “I…I don’t know, Davy. I’ve been real edgy ever since I came through the gap. I know you’ve been talking about a lot of bad vibes going on and all the rain and all, but I didn’t know it was this bad. But then at the ceremony I was looking at you, and it started raining, and suddenly I saw someone else—Lugh, I think, standing in front of a host addressing the troops, or some such. Lord, it was weird.”
“Want to talk about it? We don’t have to go to the party.”
She shook her head decisively. “Sure I want to talk about it, but after the party. This is still our prime reality, David. We’ve got to get our priorities straight. Tonight…tonight, let’s try very hard to be the people we were before we knew so much.”
David couldn’t help but grin. “I’d as soon keep some things like they are!”
A mischievous smile. “Good point.”
“Though I kinda wish we could do it for the first time all over again.”
She bent close, whispered in his ear, “You can still do it for the first time as a high-school graduate!”
“And talk this Faery thing out afterwards?”
“Sounds good. I—”
Alec appeared out of the shadows to their left and jingled the keys of his dad’s newest Volvo. “See you in MacTyrie?”
“Not if I see you first!”
Chapter V: By Diverse Waters
(MacTyrie, Georgia—Friday, June 13—evening)
“Actually, if you want to talk about it, we can,” Liz offered five minutes later, as she maneuvered Morgan, her black Ford EXP, along the water-glazed highway between Enotah and MacTyrie. For a miracle, the downpour had abated as soon as they’d reached the city limits, and there was no longer so much as a drizzle, though the highway was like a sheet of black mirror reflecting Liz’s halogen headlights and those of the occasional oncoming car. She could not see the white-painted margins, though; and only the amber reflectors made the center line visible. Her face looked hard and intent, not at all like an eighteen-year-old who would graduate in another week.
Slumped beside her David grunted noncommittally and shrugged with equal indecision, finally venting his frustration by rolling down the window (though the AC was on), and letting the cool night breeze flagellate his neck with his now-unbound hair. Head and heart, he thought, fingering Liz’s medallion through his open shirt. Heart and head
. Patience and priorities. Calm and…bullshit. He vented another, louder grunt.
They were passing the first marina now, cruising above it on a long, deep fill. The dark bulks of houseboats riding high in rain-fed water obscured the white slabs of dock and squares of cinderblock baitshops. Beyond them lay a gray-silver arm of Langford Lake, placid and sated as a sleeping satyr, and beyond it were the softly rounded masses of the Appalachians. David’s gaze wandered that way, then skyward, to see the clouds flying in ragged tatters, and—barely above the serrated horizon—the fitful light of a single star.
“I guess you don’t want to, then,” Liz supplied when he made no articulate answer.
“I…” He exhaled explosively. “Oh fiddle, Liz… Of course I wanta talk! I’m going crazy trying to figure out what’s goin’ on. I mean I really thought we were done with this when Lugh closed the friggin’ border! I honestly hoped I’d finally get a chance to be just a normal kid. And then all this happens…I…oh shit, just forget it!” A fist into the seat cushion vented his feeling of impotence.
“Davy…”
“Forget it, Liz; we already decided to let it slide tonight, at least as far as the party. I mean it is kind of a one-shot deal. Besides, do you really want to get into anything heavy when we’ve got the incipient married man to contend with?” This last sounded a little forced, but it did bring his thoughts around to other things, like Gary’s impending wedding, at which the MacTyrie Gang were to be groomsmen.
Liz chuckled, perhaps sensing that David’s mood had lightened a fraction. “Don’t forget the incipient bride! God, if I hear any more about wedding dresses I’ll go crazy!”
“Or tuxes!” David managed to laugh in turn. “She’s changed the color scheme three times. One more and me and the boys’re gonna make it blue denim!”