by J. R. Ward
I want to go to the store—can I have the keys?
Her mother’s reply: They’re in my purse. Take some money, too. And can you pick up some …
She couldn’t remember what her mom had asked her for. Broccoli? Bath soap …? Something that began with B.
The next thing she remembered was going out the front door and getting in the car … and thinking that as usual, it smelled like Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum and coffee—which might have been nasty, but was actually wonderful. Talk about straight out of childhood. Her mom had always taken a travel mug with her whenever she was in the car in the mornings, and in the afternoons, she was all about the gum. When Sissy had been in middle school and the seasonal rotation of field hockey/swimming/dance, etc., had required a nearly constant juggling of rides, the sweet, earthy smell in that Subaru had been all about home.
God, that hurt to think of right now…
And strange that on the night everything had changed she had noticed it one last time—and had smiled to herself as she’d backed out and gone at the speed limit down the road they lived on. She had been saving up for her own car, and looking forward to the summer break when she could pull big hours at Martha’s, an ice-cream place across from the Great Escape theme park near Lake George. If she bunked in with a couple of friends and worked pretty much around the clock, by the time September rolled around, she would have been able to buy her own beater and go back and forth more easily from school.
The drive had been less than four miles and taken maybe eight minutes, tops.
After pulling into the parking lot at Hannaford, she’d left the car about five spaces up from the handicap reserves, and walked quickly to the entrance with its shopping carts centipeding in rows. Inside … she had lingered over picking out the ice cream. In the end, it had been all about the Rocky Road—because she liked the crunch of the nuts and the chocolate chips and the smooth, super-sweet veins of marshmallow.
Rocky Road. How fitting.
At the self-checkout, she’d scanned the two things in her basket, the ice cream and the B whatever it had been that her mother had wanted. She’d paused to check out the new issue of Cosmopolitan, but she hadn’t gotten permission for it, and it felt wrong to buy the trashy magazine without having asked first. At that point, she’d gone for her cell to call and see if it was okay, but no-go. Having been in a rush, she’d only taken her wallet and the twenty-dollar bill her mom had let her have.
No way to phone home—or for help either, although she hadn’t been thinking about that at the time.
She could remember putting the ice cream in one of the plastic bags that was held open by struts on a Ferris-wheel scale.
Out toward the automatic doors. Into the parking lot.
Everything after that was hazy. Someone had stopped her? Someone who’d needed a…
She’d tried throughout the day to get her brain to cough up the goods, give her what she wanted, show her the steps that had led … to Hell.
All it had gotten her was a migraine.
Turning her head to the other side, she saw the curtains that hung by the bay window. Her mom had picked out the material about two years ago and made the panels herself. She’d needed help putting them up, and she and Sissy’s father had gotten a stepladder out and worked together for an hour, changing the hardware that was screwed into the walls, anchoring the rod, clipping the tops of the drapes into the hooks.
Sissy and her sister hadn’t paid any real attention to the efforts or the result—Sissy had been on her way out to a friend’s house and had offered only a passing, “It’s great!” as she’d run out the door.
Now she wished she’d been a part of the whole process.
Taking a deep breath, she pushed herself back from the warmth she’d taken advantage of. And then she stepped away from her savior. Like the relentless searching of her empty data banks, getting stuck in neutral in the middle of this room was going to get her nowhere. She had come to see her parents in their slumber, and that was exactly what she was going to do.
Except first she looked around again. Inhaled deeply. Went over to the bookcase with all the family photographs on it.
She had to blink away the tears, but she made herself stare at each of the images: If she couldn’t handle two-dimensional photographs, how the hell was she going to get through standing over her family?
“This is easier than that.”
“What?” came a deep rumble from behind her.
Okay, guess she’d said that out loud. “The wall. However hard this is, it’s got nothing on that prison. I have to … remember that.”
After a moment, Sissy squared her shoulders and walked over to the base of the stairs. Gripping the handrail, she felt the smooth wood and leaned to the side. Down at the base of the balustrade’s footer, there was the dipsy-doo, as her father had called it, the little ring around where the fixture curved into a circle. At the center of it, there was a space on the floor that was uncarpeted and hidden unless you looked down from this angle.
Every year, her parents had insisted on doing an Easter-egg hunt in the house for her and her sister—and that tradition, which had started in their toddlerhood, had continued even as they’d gotten older. It was always done inside—after all, in upstate New York, outdoors was usually not an option, assuming you didn’t want to wear a parka with your Sunday best. And her father had always used “live eggs” as opposed to those hollow plastic casings that you could fill with stuff. Didn’t seem right otherwise, he’d maintained.
Everything had usually gone well … except for that one year. Within a day or two of the hunt, an incredible stench had lit off in the house, the nose-curling horror worsening by the hour and permeating throughout—talk about your once-more-with-feeling on the hunt thing.
It had been to no avail, however. No one had been able to find the egg.
They’d had to have the place fumigated and were about to start knocking through the Sheetrock to see if some critter had taken one of her father’s “live ones” into the walls of the living room when an unlikely solution had presented itself.
On four legs.
The neighbor’s dog had discovered the dead body. Brought in as a Hail Mary, with no hope anything would help, the terrier had zeroed in on the offending item immediately—and found it in that two-square-inch space at the base of the dipsy-doo.
They’d had a good laugh about that for years.
Sissy looked over her shoulder. Her savior was standing pretty much where she’d left him—except that he’d turned to face her.
“They can’t hear us, right,” she said.
“I don’t think so, no.”
Yeah, probably not given the whole Chillie situation from this morning.
Sissy walked up the center of the stairwell, listening for the creaks that always happened when she’d done that before. The fact that there were none made her grab the shirt she was wearing and twist the fabric over her heart.
None of the living could hear her voice … and she didn’t leave footsteps in any tangible sense…
Never before had the division between the quick and the dead seemed so real.
At the head of the stairs, she looked left. Right. Straight ahead.
She went into her parents’ room first, seeping through the closed door on the left in a way that creeped her out.
The first thing that registered was her father’s snoring. Rhythmic. Low. Like an engine revving.
And then she saw her mother’s hair, messy on the pillow, highlighted by the illumination from the security lights outside.
“Mom …?” she heard come out of her mouth.
Her mother stirred in her sleep, head rotating back and forth, matting things further.
Sissy had to cover her mouth and look away.
On the nightstand, in front of the alarm clock that her mom set every night and turned off every morning, there was a book, a Bible … and a picture frame facedown.
Sissy went over and, w
ithout thinking of all the reasons she might not be able to move the thing … picked it up. The face that stared back at her was her own, and she remembered just where and when the picture had been taken—at a field hockey game while she’d been on the bench, thanks to a sprained ankle. She was staring at the action, her brows down, her profile sharp, one hand up by her chin.
It was hard to imagine now getting that jazzed over some dumb-ass high school game. In fact, she couldn’t access those feelings at all, failing utterly in the attempt to step back into that old, familiar laser focus about a ball being paddled around by a bunch of chicks with sticks. Such a silly pastime, running around on the grass for no good reason, squads of teenage girls getting hyped over their score, their plays, their team’s progress in their division and the rival they’d just had to beat…
All those sleepless nights before big games, the rampant joy after a win, the stinging, lingering burn of a loss.
Such bullshit, she thought as she put the frame back as it had been. Such manufactured drama to exercise the emotions of people whose lives were steady and secure enough to require artificial tension and stress and “big deal” moments.
Starting in the center of her chest, anger curled up inside of her, ushering out the sense of loss and replacing it with … something that was foreign to her, but oh, so very vivid.
In the flush of that new sensation, Sissy stood over her parents for the longest time, hands on hips, head down, eyes tracing the pattern of flowers on the bedspread.
She knew why the image of her was facedown. It wasn’t because she had been forgotten. Just the opposite, in fact.
“God … damn this whole thing,” she whispered.
Eventually, she knew she should go, and gave her mother and father a last look. They were aware that she was here, she thought. Just in the same way Chillie had stopped short when she’d screamed, her mother was getting more and more agitated in her sleep, and her father had stopped snoring, his brows cranking down hard over his closed eyes, his head, too, tossing back and forth.
No reason to torture them by sticking around. Besides, she wasn’t sure it was healthy for her, either. She was just getting more and more pissed off.
Leaving the room the way she’d come in, she found that her savior had come up the stairs and was waiting just outside the door. Too jazzed up, she stepped past him without a word and went across the way to her own room.
Her door was shut as well.
On the far side of it, Sissy stood stock-still, hands on her hips, anger surging even further. Just as in her parents’ room, light penetrated the thin draping over the windows, bringing out of the darkness her twin bed, her desk, her bookcases, the posters on her walls, a bluish hue tingeing everything, thanks to the color scheme.
How strange, she thought.
Instead of feeling some huge overload of emotion, some visceral connection to herself … all she did was remember her senior class trip to Italy. She’d gone on it because her friends were going and her parents had told her this was one of the most important opportunities of her life … yada, yada, yada. When she’d gotten there, she’d liked the architecture, sure, and the food had been nice, yes, but the museums? God, the museums. Endless corridors and high-ceilinged rooms filled with statues and paintings and artifacts, the lot of it all populated with people so reverent, it was like they were in church.
Those tour guides and the docents and the chaperones from school had spoken names like da Vinci and Rembrandt and Van-something-or-another like they were quoting the prophets.
Sissy had made an effort to get into it all, but hadn’t been able to go much further than noting that, yup, it was a painting. Or, yup, that was another marble sculpture that was missing an arm.
Her prevailing sense had been that none of it related to her life—and the same thing was happening now. The big difference, of course, was that these were her things, not relics of a vast past lived by strangers.
Had been her things, she corrected.
She went over and opened her closet door.
The waft of flowery perfume and body lotion made her recoil as if it were a bad smell. And as the overhead light came on automatically, the shirts and dresses and pants that hung in an orderly row off the dowel were like items in a retail store, not anything that she’d ever worn.
She couldn’t take any of these, she thought as she rifled through her old wardrobe—and in retrospect, it had been ridiculous to think she could. If she raided this closet, someone would notice what was missing—and that was a theft, wasn’t it.
No, these were not her things. Not anymore.
Pivoting away, she thought, no, not her bed, her desk, her room, her clothes.
Still her family … but she didn’t belong with them, either.
She left without a second glance, and out in the hall, she met the eyes of the silent man who was clearly guarding her. “I want to say good-bye to my sister.”
As he nodded, she thought, wow … was this really good-bye?
Was she never returning here again?
Sure felt like it.
Going to the door that was cracked open, she pushed the wood panels with her hand. Her sister’s room was on the back side of the house, and as such, there wasn’t as much light. So dark inside. Too dark.
Choking back a feeling of panic, Sissy crossed the soft carpet and stopped at the base of the bed.
Shit, she thought. All this stuff with her death? What was it going to leave her sister—
“Sissy?”
Sissy jumped in her own skin, hands flying up to her mouth.
“Sissy? Is that you?”
Her sister rolled over, the slice of light from the hall falling on her face. Her eyes were closed, but like their father, those brows were down tight—and agitation was sending her legs back and forth, as if she were running under the covers.
“Answer her,” that deep male voice said behind her.
“Sissy?”
Sissy opened her mouth. Croaked. Cleared her throat. “Yes, it’s me.”
Instantly, her sister settled down, the tension releasing, a breath exhaling as if she’d let go of a great weight.
“I knew you’d come back,” her sister mumbled as she turned to the door and rubbed her face with a floppy hand. “I knew it.”
Sissy wiped her eyes as tears came. “I’m … here. But I can’t stay.”
More with the frowning. “Why not?”
“I just can’t. But I wanted you to know … I’m okay.”
“Don’t sound okay.”
“I am.” She looked at her shaking hands, and told them to be still. “I am going to be fine. Tell Mom and Dad that, all right? I want you to tell them that I came to you, and we talked, and I want you to remember this. Promise me, Dell. You remember this.”
Her sister’s tone went into little-girl territory. “Don’t go.”
“I don’t belong here anymore, I’m so sorry.”
“Sissy—please, no—”
Without thinking, she placed her hand on her sister’s foot. “Shhhh … rest now. Shh…”
Instantly, her sister eased.
“Dell, you will remember this. You will hear this in your mind when you are worried about me, you will tell this to Mom and Dad when you see that look in their eyes. Promise me? I am … okay.”
“Only if you come back.”
Always a negotiator, her sister was. “Dell—”
“Only if I see you again.”
“Fine. I promise.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“At your funeral?”
At her … oh, God. “No, not then. But I promise. Go back to sleep. And remember that I will always love you, Dell.”
Sissy all but stumbled out of her sister’s room. And in the hall she was caught once again by the man who had brought her here and had witnessed the temporary return to a life she didn’t—couldn’t—be a part of any longer.
As he led her down the s
tairs and out through—literally—the front door, Sissy held herself, her arms straining around her own rib cage. So hard to come here, so hard to leave. The emotions were too big to name, too heavy to bear.
Out at the street, the truck’s door magically opened for her—oh, wait, it was her savior doing the duty.
Getting up into the seat, she focused on the house as the door was shut. The people under its roof were not like her clothes or her bed or her books. They were still a part of her, even though the tether felt so weak and strained.
“Put your seat belt on.”
Sissy jumped. “Oh, right.”
“You want to eat something?”
Food … food? Was she hungry?
“McDonald’s,” he announced as he started the truck’s engine and hit the gas.
Sissy just kept an eye on that house until it wasn’t possible to see it anymore. Then she wrenched herself back around and stared through the front windshield.
The loudest thing inside the vehicle, apart from the muffled growl of the engine, was the tick-tock of the directional signal as he took lefts and rights to get them out of the neighborhood.
She supposed she should thank him.
Turning to him, she could only stare.
“Why are you looking at me like that,” he asked abruptly.
“I don’t know.”
Funny, that halo that glowed around his head wasn’t something she’d noticed before—but it made sense that as an angel he’d have one.
Guess all the depictions in church had been accurate.
“I just … can’t believe this,” she mumbled.
Covering her face with her hands, all she could do was shake her head back and forth.
“Look, I know where you’re at,” he said roughly. “I’ve been there. The only thing I can tell you, and it’s not going to help … is that just because you can’t believe it, doesn’t mean the shit’s not real.” There was a long pause. “Unfortunately.”