What little light that manages to leak from the street lamps throws odd shadows all around us. Jake reaches for me, but he’s moving away, getting smaller and smaller as though he’s being pulled into a vortex until he finally disappears altogether.
The park begins to melt. The trees droop, dissolving slowly and dripping like rain to the ground. The grass pools forest-green and slick around my feet. The bench gives way beneath me and I fall on my back, sinking into a torrent of green-brown goo. The stranger stands over me now, looking down, his hair hanging like a curtain around his face.
From somewhere far in the distance, I hear the sound of scratchy voices coming through the radio speakers.
“Help! We need help, here!”
“We’re losing her.”
“Hang on, Allie!”
The last voice is familiar. Who is it? Jake? Vinnie? I can’t tell. The stranger jerks his head at the sound, then looks back at me. He holds out his hand. “I can help you.”
His voice doesn’t match his face. It’s sweet and beautifully rich. He almost sings the words as he speaks. Maybe I misjudged him. How can I be scared of someone with a voice like that? Maybe he really does want to help me.
Then he leans forward and something in his eyes snaps and glows, like a fire bursting to life, and I see Ethan all over again.
I need help. I try to shout but my mouth won’t work. All I can do is call out in my head. No!
A sound like a trumpet rips through the night. At the same time something hurtles at the stranger, and the air around me echoes with a screamed proclamation. “You can’t have her!”
Vinnie.
The stranger snaps up to his full height, eyes to the sky. Another body swoops in, moving so fast it’s little more than a blur. I can’t make out his features, but I know it’s Vinnie.
The two collide with a deafening crash and a blinding flash of white light.
An unearthly scream pierces my ears.
Relief and fear clutch me simultaneously. The stranger is gone, but I can’t feel anything. Not even the beating of my heart.
21
Vinnie’s Diner
Sounds.
The steady blip . . . blip . . . of a heart monitor.
The familiar squeak of rubber soled shoes.
Is all of me actually in the hospital now?
No. Wait. The crackling of the speakers.
Someone is calling my name.
“Allie. Allie.”
My back is cold. My hands, palms down with fingers spread out, are cold. The surface I’m laying on is hard and cold. I’m on the floor, not in a hospital bed. I open one eye, then the other. The shape of a man leans over me, silhouetted against the overhead lights.
“Welcome back.”
I gasp in relief. It’s Vinnie.
He hunkers down beside me and helps me maneuver into a sitting position. “Do you want to try standing up?”
I shake my head, a little too hard. Sparkles of light dance in front of my eyes like luminescent dust motes. I scoot back until my spine makes contact with the side of the booth and I let myself slump wearily against it. I wrap my arms around my upraised knees, hugging them tight to my chest. Even that effort is almost more than I can handle and my breath comes in shallow, short bursts.
I blink a few times. My vision clears, and I’m able to focus on my surroundings. The diner has been reduced to one small room. There’s the booth I’m leaning against, the radio, the front door, one stool and one end of the counter. Everything and everyone else is gone.
“Where are the others?”
Vinnie lowers himself all the way down and sits cross-legged on the floor opposite me. “You don’t have enough strength to have them around anymore.” He reaches out and pats me on the arm. “Even if you did, they can’t go where you’re going.”
I let my forehead drop against my knees. Maybe I don’t need them, but I want them. I want Elvis to bring me some disgusting sandwich and twitch his eyebrow at me. I want Norma Jeane to wiggle into the booth, lean forward with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, and beg me to tell her more about the boy I sent away. I want to talk to them and ignore the strange nightmare place I’ve just come from.
“Are you ready to talk about it?”
My head jerks up, and I glare at Vinnie. Am I ready? How could anybody ever be ready for this? As a matter of fact, no, I’m far from ready, but I get the feeling my time is running out. It’s taking all the strength I have to sit upright, to hold up my head. The realization hits me like a fist to the gut: I may die here. So I nod and hope Vinnie’s going to lead me to the end of this insane maze.
“Good.” He rests his elbows on his thighs, steepling his fingers together. “Why are you so afraid to love Jake?”
You’ve got to be kidding. “Jake? Why do you care about Jake? I want to know who that creepy guy was, and why the park turned to soup. And did I just almost die?”
“None of that matters until you deal with this first.”
I pound the heels of my hands into my forehead, fighting the urge to scream. Why is my love life so important? Dropping my hands, I brace my palms on the floor and lean toward Vinnie. “I’m not afraid to love Jake, I just don’t want to marry the guy. Okay? Case closed. Can we move on now?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re lying.”
I swear, then clamp my mouth shut and bite down on my lower lip. It’s probably not a good idea to swear around an angel. But instead of calling down some kind of punishment, Vinnie just laughs. This should make me feel better, but it only succeeds in stirring up a new wave of frustration. “Oh, so angels think swearing is funny?”
He shrugs, still grinning. “Not all angels, but I do. If you people could hear yourselves. You don’t even understand what some of the things you’re saying mean. Which brings me back to you.” All signs of amusement are now gone from his face. He’s my serious guardian angel again, intent on doing his job. “There’s more to this situation with Jake than you want to admit. You’ve run from it, hidden it, even lied about it, and it hasn’t done you any good. It’s still eating away at you. If you don’t bring it out into the light and face it, you can’t move past it.”
Panic rises up, threatening to choke me. For a moment, the lights in the diner become even dimmer. They flicker, the bulbs threatening to burn out and leave me in the dark, but then they stabilize, coming back on with a steady glow.
I can’t. I can’t do what he’s asking me. I can’t go to that place. It’s bad enough that I have to live with the memories, but what will Vinnie think when he finds out? Right now, he sees me as the innocent girl, the victim in a life full of hard knocks and not very nice people. But he doesn’t really know me.
Or does he?
I venture a look into his eyes. They are strong, kind, patient. There’s nothing there to make me think he’ll be shocked by anything I tell him. Is this just another of those times when he already knows exactly what I’m going to say, but he makes me say it anyway? I have the urge to swear again, but I rein it in this time. Vinnie can be exasperating, but if he really is an angel—and it’s as good as any explanation I can come up with—then I should be able to trust him.
“Do you have any idea how it feels to be told you’re the answer to someone’s prayer?”
Vinnie’s head tilts to the side, and I know what he’s thinking. You must be kidding.
“Stupid question. You’re an angel. That’s your job, right?” I take in a breath, but it catches in my chest and I have to start over again: breath out, breath in, breath out. Like that old shampoo commercial: lather, rinse, repeat.
I shake my head and remind myself to stay on track. “But I’m different. I can’t possibly be the answer to Jake’s prayer.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve done things . . . things no good Christian girl would do. At least not any girl Jake would fall in love with.”
“Sounds like he fe
ll in love with you,” Vinnie says, his voice soft and low.
“That’s only because he doesn’t know. He wouldn’t love me if he knew everything about me. And then he’d understand that this whole thing about me being an answer to his prayer is just a big mistake.” I put my hand to my forehead, pinching the skin hard.
Vinnie leans forward. “But what if you are the answer to his prayer? What if God does mean for you two to be together?”
I drop my hand. Let my head fall back against the side of the booth. “That’s even worse. Don’t you see? He prayed that God would protect his future wife. He asked God to keep her safe. But if I’m the answer to his prayer, then God fell down on the job. He didn’t protect me.” The volume of my voice escalates until it reaches a shrill pitch that sounds almost manic. “God didn’t keep Shooter from hitting me. He didn’t keep Ethan from manhandling me. He didn’t keep my mother from hating me. He didn’t stop me from—”
The thought dies there, caught halfway between my brain and my lips. I can’t make myself say it. So I do what I always do. What I’ve done my whole life as a way of surviving, living through the pain. I pretend it doesn’t exist. “Don’t you see, Vinnie? Either way, Jake gets hurt.”
“So do you.”
My throat feels like there’s a fist lodged inside and I can barley swallow past it. “That’s okay. I’m used to it.”
Vinnie reaches out, takes one of my hands in his. “What did you do that was so terrible? What could make you think you don’t deserve to be loved?”
I look up at the table. The chest still sits there, its top gaping open. There’s probably some memento inside, some token to start me down this road. But I don’t need it. I’ve revisited it so many times on my own that I know the way by heart. It’s a place I go in my dreams, in my nightmares. A place I’ve never really been able to leave.
I pull my hand away from Vinnie.
“I killed my daughter.”
22
Southern California—six years earlier
I’m staring down into a toilet bowl.
What in the . . . I look around, and my stomach lurches. I’m on the bathroom floor of my mother’s house. No. I don’t want to live this day over. A wave of nausea surges through me in a cold rush, and I swing my head back around.
Here I go.
“Allie, are you all right? What’s going on in there?”
I hug the toilet seat, heaving up the rest of my breakfast while my mother alternates between yelling and pounding on the door. My heart is thudding a beat of its own, hard and deep, like the rhythm of a funeral dirge. Or a death march.
“I’ll be out in a minute. I—” My sentence is cut off prematurely by another rush of nausea, and I hang my head over the disgusting contents of the porcelain bowl. This can’t be happening. It can’t. Not again.
But it is.
I reach blindly behind me, waving my fingers about until I feel the edge of a bath towel. Pulling it down, I bury my face in the soft terry cloth, but the smell of fabric softener makes me retch again, so I toss the towel in the bathtub. I stand up and flush the toilet. Then I close the lid and sit on top of it, taking a moment to calm down, to breathe more steadily.
The incessant pounding on the door makes it impossible to relax. So does my mother’s screaming. “Open this door right now, young lady. I want to know what’s going on!”
I wish I had the guts to scream back at her, to tell her “No, you really don’t want to know!” But instead I call out, “Just a second.” After quickly washing my hands and brushing my teeth, I unlock the door and slowly pull it open.
My mother is standing so close to the door that she’s practically inside with me before I can get out of her way. She looks wildly around the room, as if she might find my secret hiding in a corner. Then she looks at me, looks at my stomach, looks back up at my face. I keep waiting for her to say something, but now that no door stands between us, she is weirdly quiet. When she finally does speak, her voice is flat and cold.
“You got yourself pregnant, didn’t you?”
It’s a rhetorical question, of course. She obviously doesn’t need an answer. But I give her one anyway. “Yes.”
Even though it’s the answer she’d been expecting, I see her crumble a little. Her eyes slam shut, she turns her head, puts her hand to her mouth, sucks in a deep breath. I expect her to make that sound of hers, the shrieking wail signaling some terrible tragedy that’s fallen in her lap. But she doesn’t. Instead, she blows the breath out in a sharp gust, and when she looks back at me, she’s her usual collected, hard as stone, self again.
“How could you let this happen?”
How could I let it happen? I want to say it wasn’t all my fault, that there was another person involved, but that would just make it worse. Bad enough I’m in this situation, there’s no point in reminding her how I got this way. It’s useless to tell her that I’ve seen her with so many men and heard her talk for so long about women using their bodies to get what they want, that sex seemed like the natural next step when I got into a serious relationship. And I don’t dare bring up the fact that not once over all those years did she talk to me about birth control or what happened after the sex was over. Nope, all that stuff is off limits. So I say the only safe thing I can think of.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? You’re sorry?” Her brittle laugh ricochets around the room, bouncing off the bathroom walls, colliding with the mirror, slapping me in the face. “Do you think that makes it all better? Do you have any idea how badly you’ve screwed up this time?”
A month ago, when I realized I might be pregnant, my first thought was to go to my mother. On the heels of that thought was one that made a lot more sense: Are you nuts? So I’d kept it a secret, praying for a period that didn’t come, hoping the nausea was just a flu bug that wouldn’t go away. But it got to the point where I couldn’t ignore it anymore. So this morning at breakfast, I tried to tell her. I started to, but I had to break off in midsentence and run for the bathroom. Apparently I’d told her enough, because when the puking started, she put it all together.
Now she stands in front of me, hands on her hips, eyebrows, pulled down, her lips in a hard, thin line. She’s an Amazon warrior ready to do battle. This is exactly why I was afraid to say anything to her. Yes, I messed up, but I’m scared. All I want right now is a little sympathy. A hug, a smile . . . anything. But I’m not going to get it from her.
“Yeah, Mom, I’m nothing but a big screw up.” Hurt and anger propel me from the bathroom, and I manage to push past her. I’m heading for my room when fingers wrap around my arm just above my elbow. She pulls me to a stop and jerks me back around to face her.
“We’re not done yet.”
“Yes we are.” I snap at her, getting right in her face. She wants to talk about this? Fine. Then she’s going to have to listen to what I have to say, too. “I’m pregnant. I took a page out of your book and used my body to get what I wanted, only I ended up with a little something extra. It’s not the way I planned it, but it’s done and now I’ve got to figure out a way to live with it.”
She doesn’t respond to the insults I just tossed her way. Instead, she inclines her head in my direction, looking at me like I’m mentally challenged. “No, you don’t.”
I take a step back, pulling as far away as I can with her still holding on to me. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said.” She squeezes my arm tighter. “You made a stupid mistake, but at least it’s early enough to take care of it.”
The implication of what she’s saying inundates me. Like I’ve been pushed into a swimming pool full of ice water, I’m sinking, going in over my head. “You mean have an . . . an . . .” I can’t bring myself to say the word. Because I’ve thought about this. A lot. Heck, it’s been impossible to think of much else since I realized I was pregnant. And I realized that this is my shot. This is my chance to have someone in my life to love and to love me back, unconditional
ly. I’ve played out a thousand scenarios in my mind, and I’ve already bonded with this child. To think of terminating it . . . I just can’t.
But she can. “An abortion. Yes.”
An odd, strangled cry comes out of me before I can stop it. It’s the kind of thing that would elicit sympathy from most mothers, but it just gets mine more riled up.
“Oh, don’t go getting all self-righteous with me.” She rolls her eyes to the ceiling and lets go of my arm, flinging her hands up in the air. “It’s a perfectly legal, sensible solution.”
Maybe for her it is, but not for me. It’s not what I want. In a defensive gesture that’s pure reflex, I wrap my arms over my stomach. “I’m keeping her.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Her?”
I nod. “The baby’s a girl. I know she is.”
My mother shakes her head, her expression close to disgust. “You’re making a big mistake, thinking of it as a baby. This whole thing will be a lot easier if you accept the fact that it’s not alive yet.”
It seems odd that she’s thought this through so thoroughly, especially since she just found out about what’s going on with me. Then a thought comes to my mind, and I’m hit full force with another wave from the ice water pool. “You’ve had one, haven’t you?”
A muscle in her jaw twitches. She swallows. “We’re not talking about me.”
No, but in her nonanswer, I discover the truth. My heart aches. She’s had one. For all I know, she’s had more than one. How many brothers or sisters might I have now if she hadn’t taken advantage of this perfectly legal, sensible solution?
Lifting my chin, ever so slightly, I repeat myself. “I’m keeping her.”
“Is that so? Well if you do, you can kiss college goodbye. And where are you going to live? How are you going to support yourself? You’re going to need a job, and don’t think I’m going to help you with . . . with . . . that.” She points at my stomach like I’m holding a sewer rat in my hands.
I don’t have a good answer for all her questions, but there’s one thing I do know. I don’t want her anywhere near my baby. “I don’t need your help. Cody and I will be fine on our own.”
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