Prom Night in Purgatory (Slow Dance in Purgatory)

by Harmon, Amy

  “Maggie!” The relief in his voice echoed down the hallway and into her heart.

  “Go! We need to go, Johnny.” He swung her up against him, his arms around her, his face in her hair.

  “Maggie, where in the hell have you been? And what the hell are you doing here?” His voice was angry, but he held her tightly, contradicting his tone.

  “Johnny!” Maggie sputtered. Billy looked dumbfounded, watching the ladies man that was his big brother embracing the mysterious brunette in a siren red prom dress...and no shoes.

  “Johnny!” Maggie wrenched herself from him and cried out as Roger Carlton materialized out of the shadowy hallway beyond. He had circled around and come out on the opposite side. Billy and Johnny both stood with their backs to him, unaware that death had come to call. He raised his gun, aiming for Johnny’s back.

  Maggie didn’t consciously decide in that moment to do what she did. It wasn’t an act of heroism or sacrifice. It was simply the instinctual nature of a woman to stand between death and those she loves, and that is what she did. She stepped around Johnny, covering him, her arms extended like wings to shelter him. In the same instant, Johnny swung around and, seeing Roger, cried out a warning to his brother. But Roger wasn’t aiming for Billy. The gun exploded and Roger’s bullet struck Maggie, throwing her back violently into Johnny’s arms.

  “Maggie!” Johnny cried out in horror as she collapsed against him, causing him to fall back heavily and struggle to keep his feet. Roger shot again, but his aim was skewed with adrenaline, and the bullet veered just right of Johnny’s left shoulder, embedding itself in the wall beyond him.

  Johnny wrapped one arm around Maggie, easing her to the floor, sheltering her with his larger frame as he warded Roger off with his left arm extended.

  Roger just smiled and leveled the gun at the wounded girl. And then her image flickered. For the briefest instant she was gone, leaving nothing but a pool of blood beneath her. She reappeared almost instantly. Roger stared, the hand that held the gun wavered as he blinked his eyes and shook his head vigorously from side to side. Johnny didn’t see Maggie shivering in and out like a mirage. His eyes were trained on Roger and the gun in his outstretched hand.

  Without warning, Johnny lunged for Roger, reaching for the gun as he barrelled into his chest. Roger was caught completely unaware, his attention riveted on Maggie. He flew back, squeezing the trigger once more as he collided with the wooden balustrade that separated safety from space and life from Purgatory.

  The momentum carried Roger up and over the railing, and Johnny scrabbled to extricate himself from Roger’s clinging limbs, only to find himself hurtling beyond rescue with his enemy wrapped around him. Their eyes locked for a split second, maniacal green on sky blue, and then they were falling, tumbling through the air in a sloppy cartwheel. Maggie’s scream punctured the air as yet another shot rang out, drowning out Billy’s cry of horror as he watched his brother plummet to the tiled entrance two stories below.

  ~24~A Time for Peace

  Roger Carlton lay with his legs twisted beneath him, his head cocked at an odd angle, staring blankly at the domed ceiling high above. Billy had never seen death before, but he had no doubt that Roger was dead. He had definitely taken the brunt of the fall -- Johnny had fallen on top of him and then rolled to the side. But Johnny wasn’t moving either. Roger had managed one final shot as death rose to meet him. The gun was still clutched in his hand, resting on his abdomen, his finger curled around the trigger. That last shot had pierced Johnny high on the right side of his chest.

  Billy didn’t remember running down the winding stairs to his brother’s side, but he was suddenly there, kneeling next to Johnny, begging him to hold on, begging him not to leave. Johnny’s breath was labored, and blood soaked his shirt and pooled beneath him. His eyes were wide and scared.

  “Maggie?” Johnny groaned.

  “She’s hurt bad, Johnny!” Billy cried, tears dripping down his young face and onto his brother’s heaving chest. “I’ve got to go get help. For you and for her! Hold on Johnny, please hold on!”

  ***

  Maggie eased herself down the stairs, clinging to the railing with her good arm, her right arm useless where the bullet had sunk into her shoulder. She could hear Billy talking, begging. She had to get to Johnny. She wouldn’t look, wouldn’t allow herself to turn her head to see the bodies of the fallen boys. She had to focus, had to get down the stairs. She was weak and dizzy, but surprisingly free of pain, as if she had physically passed beyond the earthly plane and existed somewhere between time’s layers. The wrenching, pulling, pounding at her core demanded she succumb and fly away. She fought it desperately as she focused on one step and then one more, moving faster than she thought she could, letting her need to reach Johnny fuel her efforts.

  And then she heard Billy leave, racing through the double front doors, out into the night beyond. Maggie cleared the bottom step and let her gaze rest on the figures sprawled in horrific display in the center of the rotunda. Maggie’s legs buckled at the sight.

  “Johnny!” Her keening voice echoed through the stately entrance like a death knell. She attempted a step forward, but gravity swallowed her whole.

  ***

  Johnny tried to keep his eyes open and resisted the magnetic pull that fought to wrench him from himself. It was like the pull of the undertow, and for a moment Johnny thought he was dreaming. He thought he was back at the beach -- ten years old -- feeling the sand being sucked out from beneath his toes, his mom and Billy back on the blanket, the sun bright overhead. But the pull was much stronger, and Johnny fought for something to anchor himself to. His hands didn't want to work, and his legs felt like they'd fallen asleep. His chest burned like he'd been too long underwater. He curled his toes inside his boots and fought against the pull with all his might. Why was he wearing his boots at the beach?

  In terror, he realized what the pull was, and he forced his eyes open to find his brother. But it wasn’t Billy that lay beside him. Billy had gone for help. Billy was okay. Billy was safe. But Maggie wasn’t .

  "Maggie?" He tried to form the word, but he could not.

  "Maggie!" He tried again and heard only a whisper of breath.

  Johnny screamed inside his head. He screamed, and he fought the pull and demanded an audience with the source of the power trying to disconnect him from his body.

  "I'm not going anywhere!" he raged over and over, over and over, until the pressure built and exploded in white light and brilliant sparks like a blow torch on metal. Johnny felt a snapping and a shredding, but there was no pain, only pressure, and then a giant crack, like a million balloons simultaneously popping. And then…nothing.

  ***

  2011

  When Maggie again became aware, she was lying across the front seat of the pink Cadillac. For a minute she didn’t know where she was, or more specifically, when she was. The pain that had been held at bay by time or adrenaline was now almost unbearable, and the seat beneath her was slick with blood. She eased herself to a sitting position, and her head spun and unconsciousness rose to claim her again. She protested loudly, crying out against oblivion’s lure. She struggled to maintain her grip on reality, whatever that was, and find a clue as to where she had landed.

  “I’m in 2011,” she moaned, seeing the blackened shell of Honeyville High School through the car’s front window. The silk trees that lined the Prom’s dance floor stood like a sentinel between the hope of before and the despair of after. Her small purse and her phone lay on the floor where she had tossed them earlier. She stretched, whimpering, and wrapped her left hand around the shiny gadget. She pressed the button to turn it on, breathing through clenched teeth. It lit up briefly and then gave the cascading tones of shut-down mode. It was dead. Maggie moaned again, lying back against the seat, pressing her palm against the flow of blood below her right shoulder. Her dress was useless, the fabric completely unsuitable to staunch its flow. The flesh of her palm would have to do, but it hurt
too much to press as tightly as she should.

  She was in trouble. And she was too tired and heartbroken to care. The image of Johnny, bloody and motionless, with Roger Carlton lying in a twisted heap at his side, filled her head, and she turned her face into the seat, letting her tears flow with the blood that wouldn’t be stemmed.

  Suddenly, the passenger side door was wrenched open. Maggie lifted her head wearily, unable to find the energy for surprise. Johnny was framed in the opening, moonlight at his back.

  “Johnny?” Maggie whimpered in disbelief.

  “Maggie!” Johnny flipped the key in the Caddie’s ignition, illuminating Maggie where she huddled against the seat.

  “Come on, baby! We’ve got to get you to the hospital.” His hair was disheveled, his white sports coat abandoned, his dress shirt untucked, and his tie dangling.

  “Why does Heaven hurt so much?” Maggie whispered, wanting to embrace him but unable to move.

  “Maggie. This ain’t Heaven, baby. Come on, Maggie! You gotta stay with me.” Johnny was frantic, his eyes never leaving Maggie’s face. He didn’t know if she would survive the drive to the hospital. He had to stop the bleeding. Her skin was pasty white, and her body was limp. It was probably a miracle she was conscious at all. The Bel Air was waiting, the engine rumbling, ready to transport her to wherever Johnny wished, but she was out of time.

  He didn’t know if he could do it. But he had done it before. He slid Maggie so she was lying flat against the front seat. Then he knelt at her side, his legs folded awkwardly in the foot-well, and then he pressed both of his hands into her wound, remembering how it felt to gather energy, to feel it flooding his system like a hot white light. He remembered it so clearly now. Every moment of the last fifty-three years was stamped on his memory like a prison tattoo, permanent and fixed.

  He had been riding in the back of that overcrowded truck, instruments and equipment pressing against him. He had known leaving Maggie was a mistake, and the farther from her he traveled, the greater the overwhelming sense of wrongness became. They were almost to his sister’s house when something had yanked at him, loosening him from his physical surroundings, as if he were tied to an anchor and dropped into a weightless sea. And like water, the knowledge of what had been drenched him in memory.

  He was suddenly, acutely, aware. He remembered the loneliness of the last fifty-three years. He remembered the despair, the intense anguish, and yet...the opportunity. In Purgatory he hadn’t aged, but he had grown and changed. He had discovered an inner power and an inner strength. He had developed fortitude, patience, and perspective. He remembered it all. And most of all, he remembered Maggie.

  He flew through their time in Purgatory, watching the relationship unfold, remembering the wonder he had felt at her friendship, letting the desire he had felt to join her in life resonate within him.

  And then he had flown beyond Purgatory to the final moments of his old life, when he lay at Roger Carlton’s side, at peace in the knowledge that he had saved his brother. He and Maggie had saved Billy. “It is a far, far better thing that I do now.” The words of Dickens echoed prophetically in his head.

  He watched Maggie as she struggled to descend the stairs, her blood spilling across the bodice of her dress, her attention riveted on the next step. She was doing everything in her power to reach him. In that moment, he had been well aware of his choice and what that choice would mean. Paradise or Purgatory?

  He saw Maggie stagger as she reached the main floor. She cried out his name, and then she was gone. She simply vanished. Nothing remained but the trail of blood that stretched beyond her to the third floor, marking her path, verifying her existence. He knew where she had gone.

  Paradise or Purgatory? The choice was easy. He chose Purgatory.

  ***

  2011

  Johnny bore down. Maggie hissed, the pain keeping her tethered to the present. He pushed away the doubt that said he had relinquished Purgatory and all that had gone with it. He remembered the spark that had shorted out Jillian’s computer. He remembered how quickly he had healed in the hospital after escaping Purgatory. He acknowledged the fire he felt burning just beneath the surface. Surely something from Purgatory remained.

  Johnny called on that heat that lay beneath his skin and gathered it, coaxing it forward until it seared the skin on his palms where they were pressed into Maggie’s wound. The pain was shocking, but he used it. He used the intense pain in his hands, the overwhelming love in his heart, and the bottomless faith that there was purpose in Purgatory, and turned it outward. Light began to seep out from the edges of his fingers, as if he held his palms over the beam of a flashlight. The intensity grew and grew until light filled the interior of the old car and spilled out of the windows. The Cadillac, marooned in the dark parking lot, became a lighthouse to the lost, guiding Maggie and Johnny home at last.

  Epilogue

  Matching scars might not be much to build a future on, but Maggie and Johnny had earned theirs. And if scars are the reminders of the past, then the identical puckered pink circles high on the right sides of each of their chests bore witness of the hard fought battle they had waged through time and space. And Johnny and Maggie remembered all of it. The sacrifice, the sorrow, the race against time, all leading up to the moment Johnny chose Purgatory.....again. Like a movie with alternate endings, they not only knew what the world had become, but what the world had been like before, when two people, two worlds apart, had found each other and fallen in love.

  No one in 1958 ever knew what happened to Johnny -- or Maggie, for that matter. Billy had gone for help, only to return to a bloody trail leading down the stairs from where Maggie had been shot and a pool of blood where Johnny had lain. And Roger Carlton, of course. He was dead, and very few grieved for him.

  In the space of a few hours, the world had changed. At least a small corner of it. Billy didn’t die, and Roger did. Irene didn’t marry Roger, but many years later she married Billy. And there were some things that didn’t change. Sadly, Irene still gave birth to a stillborn baby, and she and Billy never had children of their own. Dolly Kinross still suffered, Chief Bailey still searched for answers, and the years still passed while Johnny Kinross languished in Purgatory, waiting for the day when Maggie O’Bannon would help him break free.

  When a young Maggie came to live with her Great Aunt Irene and her Uncle Billy when she was orphaned at age ten, Billy commented on the coincidence that she was named Maggie and that she resembled the girl that still haunted his memory. But it had been so long ago, and it was beyond comprehension to think the two girls were one in the same. Billy, Irene, and Maggie traveled quite extensively with Billy’s work, but Maggie’s last year in high school found them back in Honeyville, back in the old family home, back where the story truly began. And then time resumed its track, Maggie found Johnny in Purgatory, and what was became what is.

  After all, that which has been is now, and that which is to be has already been.

  The End

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

  Thanks go to my mom for being my sounding board and for reading even when she was solving the world’s problems - or at least the world’s math problems. Also, big thanks to Lorraine Wallace for being the best English teacher and editor a girl could have and for volunteering to help a starving writer. Big hug. I promise you, someday you will get paid. Maybe.

  Thank you, kiddos -- Paul, Hannah, Claire, and Sam -- for putting up with your crazy writer mother, and the foggy brain and sometimes messy house that accompany each book. Ditto goes for the big guy - Travis, thanks for hangin’ in.

  Finally, a big thanks to all who read my first two novels and gave me the encouragement to keep writing. Terri Bailey Clark, Mary Purdon Stevens, Shauna Harmon, Cindy Joy Wilkerson, all of Juab County, and so many of my Saints Unified Voices friends, so many of you went the extra mile for me. To my siblings --- particularly you, Joey Sutorius -- you guys rock. And thank you, Dad, for always making me feel like
my success is never a surprise. Thank you!

  The song, “Where or When” was written in 1937 by the songwriting duo, Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and Lorenz Hart (1895-1943). They worked together on 28 stage musicals and more than 500 songs. Thank you for your contribution, gentlemen. Your lyrics were perfect!

  Amy Harmon has written three novels, all available in paperback and e-book on Amazon. www.amazon.com/author/amyharmon

  Books by Amy Harmon:

  Running Barefoot

  Slow Dance in Purgatory

  Prom Night in Purgatory

  Visit her at www.authoramyharmon.com

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