“Brielle? Are you all right?” Marco leans forward, looking into my eyes. “You’re pale.”
I want to reassure him, but mostly I want him to back away. Far away from the halo warming my arm. I lean against the table and press it against my stomach, wrapping it in the material at my waist. Standing, I turn away from him.
“Brielle?”
My sandals sound like army boots banging away at the floor as I run down the hall and into Jake’s room. I try to slam the door behind me, but it bounces off of something with a dull thud.
I hear it vibrate open and turn back to close it.
But Marco’s there. Followed me down the hall, his face concerned.
Stupid chivalry.
“What’s wrong?” he says, grabbing my shoulder.
That’s all it takes. My dress shifts, and the halo slides down my arm, tumbling into the air. It’s about halfway between the cuff and the crown when Marco catches it. But even his grip can’t stop it from reforming, and he jerks his hand away. I’m not sure if it’s the heat or the foreign feeling of metal moving under his touch, but the halo falls, landing on a pile of neatly mated socks.
Marco crouches, peering at the halo like a boy staring at a wriggling earthworm.
What is he thinking?
I want him to say something.
No, I don’t, because it’s sure to be a question.
A question I don’t know how to answer.
“Please tell me this is a homing device,” he says. “That it’ll take us back to the Enterprise if we click our heels together and say sweet things about home?”
I sink to the floor, kneading my face with the heels of both palms as the halo finishes its transformation.
“You know, I—I haven’t tried that.”
His eyes are reflected in the burnished surface. They look bulbous, amplifying this ridiculous geek-out. “Where did you get it?”
I don’t know what he’ll do if I tell him, but I know this: I won’t lie to Marco like my dad lied to me. Not even to make this conversation easier.
“Jake gave it to me,” I say.
“Can I touch it?”
I nod. He’s not looking at me, but I do it anyway. “It won’t hurt you.”
He presses his face closer and his fingers prod at it, like he plans to dissect it next. After a minute he slides his index finger around the rim. “It’s so hot. It’s like . . . like your hands,” he says quietly, his emerald eyes finding mine. “The night we found the children.”
He’s talking about something that happened at the warehouse. I reached down to help Marco up, and after wearing the halo for several days, my hands had taken on its heat. At the time he looked . . . well, like he looks now. Confused and in awe all at once.
It’s a feeling I understand.
“It does that,” I say.
He finally plucks up the courage and lifts the halo in his hands. I nearly have a heart attack, but I let him.
“What is it?”
And there it is. The question I really don’t want to answer.
“It’s a halo.”
I jump at the voice, but it’s Jake, standing in the doorway. Suddenly the world weighs half as much.
“Halo? Like the game?” Marco’s eyes haven’t moved from the crown in his hands.
“It’s nothing like the game,” Jake says.
And then he does it. There isn’t time to do anything but gasp before Marco has the thing on his head. It’s that fast. My throat makes a strange sound, and Jake looks as stupefied as I do. But he holds his hands up, his eyes telling me to wait.
Waiting is hard.
“It’s so hot,” Marco says. His shoulders sag and his eyes flutter and I don’t know what to do, what the halo will do. Jake must sense my discomfort, my need to act, because he signals again that I should wait.
Marco’s cheeks flush red, and his eyes, though closed, move back and forth behind his lids. He takes one . . . two . . . three . . . four peaceful breaths and then his breathing accelerates, faster and faster. He groans and cries out, jerking upright and sending the halo tumbling to his lap.
His upper lip breaks out in beads of sweat and his face takes on a slick, white pallor.
“Marco?” I say, crawling closer. “Are you all right?”
His Adam’s apple moves up and then down as his trembling hands push the halo off his leg, flinging it from him. It tumbles to a rest under Jake’s bed, but Marco’s standing already, holding every bit of my attention.
“Marco?” I ask again.
He shakes his head and turns away, toward the door. Toward Jake.
“Sit down, Marco. We’ll explain.”
His head turns left and right, and his hands continue to shake. I remember a time, in this very room, when mine did the same. I realize only half a breath before it happens that Marco is going to run, just like I did.
And then he does.
His shoulder connects with Jake’s as he pushes past him and down the hall. I stand and lurch toward the door, Jake already pursuing him. Before I make it halfway down the hall, I hear the front door open and close.
Marco’s gone.
As I round the corner into the kitchen, Jake flings open the door, his momentum propelling him onto the porch. I’m right behind, but when I fall into step next to him, his arm wraps my waist and I stop.
“Let him go,” Jake says.
“What if he saw the Celestial, Jake? He won’t understand that without help.”
“Not now. If I know Marco, he needs to try to figure this out on his own. When he reaches the end of his understanding, he’ll be back.”
“Jake . . .”
“Waiting is a part of the process, Elle. His mind can’t be forced.”
Canaan’s said those very words to me. On that same night. The night of the warehouse. The night Marco touched my hands and realized something was different. What did he tell himself about that? Did he reason it away?
What will he tell himself about the halo?
And how long will it take him to realize he needs help understanding?
I lean into Jake and watch as Marco disappears. He’s headed toward town. Toward Main Street.
There’s not much there, but I hope he finds what he’s looking for.
24
Brielle
You have time for a drive?” Jake asks.
He’s released my waist and stepped away. It’s weird to have distance between us. I try to shake off the look on Marco’s face and focus on Jake. On this moment. But he’s walking away from me, down the stairs.
“I have something to show you. It’s not far.” He opens the passenger door to his car and holds it for me. I turn toward my house, toward the conversation waiting there for me. The sheriff’s cruiser is still in the drive. Dad will be fine. He has company and I’m still not ready to see him, so I drop down the stairs and slide into the Karmann Ghia.
Jake wasn’t kidding when he said we weren’t going far. He pulls off the highway and parks as near to the Stratus Cemetery gate as he can. Yellow caution tape marks off several areas where dirt and rocks seem to have been displaced.
“Is this all from my mother’s grave?”
“Yeah,” Jake says. “Crazy, huh?”
Being back here is strange. It feels very disconnected to me, and yet if I’m to believe Virtue, all this turmoil was caused because the grave was empty. Because my dad hid emptiness below the ground.
All this because I wanted truth.
I expect to be sad or angry being here again, but I’m just numb. We duck under the caution tape, and I let Jake lead me through the gate and along the path. It’s quiet. Birds zipping through the summer sky, chattering. Dragonflies escort us, unaware that this place has been violated. And still Jake says nothing until we’re standing beneath the mangled branches of the willow tree.
“I found something,” he says.
“Here? When?”
“Last night. This morning, actually. I came back,” he says. �
��Waited till the police cleared the area, and then I searched.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Anything,” he says. “Just something to point us in the right direction.”
Us.
“I really am sorry about that night. About sending you away like that.”
“Stop,” he says. “I’m not mad.”
His face is tighter than I’m used to, but I’m not about to call him a liar.
“Okay.” I squeeze his hand. “So you found something?”
“Look up,” he says.
The leaves of the willow are singed in places, branches bent and broken. Amongst the wreckage, it takes my eyes a second to find it. But there, hanging from a splintered branch, is a necklace.
It hangs about twelve feet up, a circlet of beads with a single wooden ornament decorating it.
A flower.
I refuse to sink to the mud here again, so I grab Jake’s arms. “I know that necklace. I’ve seen it.”
“Where?”
“I had another . . . it was . . . in a nightmare.”
“You had another nightmare? A different nightmare?”
“It started Saturday night, before the cemetery. You think that was buried with my mom?”
“Elle, we need to talk about the nightmare.”
“I know, and we will, but—”
He growls, frustrated.
“Jake! Do you . . . do you think it was in her casket?”
He releases my hand with a little more gusto than absolutely necessary and moves to the tree. “The thought crossed my mind,” he says. “I don’t know any other way it could have gotten up there.”
Jake grabs hold of a low-hanging limb. Hand over hand, he works his way up to the necklace and with deft fingers works it free.
“Catch.”
The necklace falls straight down, the wooden ornament tugging it toward me. I catch it easily and set to examining it. The beads are multicolored and strung in no particular order. There’s no clasp, just a knot holding it all together. The wooden ornament is circular and smooth, a white plumeria painted on it. Its yellow center is faded, the white petals scratched, but there’s no mistaking it. This is the necklace from my nightmare.
Jake drops from the tree.
“This is it,” I say. “The girl was wearing it in my dream.”
“The girl in the hallway?”
“Yes and no. It was the same girl, but she was younger, happier. Until . . .”
I have a terrifying thought. “Jake, I think the nightmares are coming from the Throne Room. I think they’re telling me something.”
“Why do you think I’m freaking out?” A cold wind blows through the cemetery, too cold for July. The willow shivers and my hair whips about. I tie it back in a knot, my mind trying to place the puzzle pieces. And now there are just so many.
“Marco found a picture in Ali’s journal. It’s of a woman with three scars marking her arm.”
“Like the girl?” Jake asks, his face distractingly close to mine. Still, I soldier on.
“Exactly like the girl. And Marco was telling me this story that seems—”
“We need to talk to Canaan,” Jake says. “He’s the best at reading the Throne Room’s intentions. I just . . . why weren’t these things delivered as clues? If we’re supposed to do something with what we know, why isn’t the Throne Room using the chest?”
It’s a good question. Why isn’t Canaan the one putting these pieces together?
“Maybe because we won’t always have the chest,” I tell him, the idea strange but sensible. “If Canaan’s reassigned and you stay with me . . .” But there’s the other possibility. That I’m the one having nightmares because they could both choose to leave and I’m supposed to piece this together myself. “You are staying with me?”
“I’m not leaving, Elle,” he says, tipping my chin to his and speaking soft words into my mouth. “I’ve told you that. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Okay.”
There’s something in his eyes that makes my stomach clench, makes it crave. It’s longing, I realize, and that scares me a little. There are things we can’t share just yet. Things we shouldn’t share. Until Jake, I never realized how easy it’d be to give up something that isn’t mine to part with.
I step back, Jake’s eyes falling to the necklace in my hand.
“What do you think about the necklace?” he asks, his voice thick.
I breathe away some of the tension and turn the wood flower in my hands.
“It’s beautiful, but there’s nothing to indicate it came from Mom’s grave.”
“Except the debris, of course,” Jake says, looking around.
“Yeah, there is that.”
“You could ask your dad,” he says.
“As if.” I blow a strand of hair from my face. “Although . . .”
“Although?”
“Dad’s not the only one who might able to tell me if this belonged to Mom.”
“Who then?”
“Miss Macy,” I say.
“Grandmother Tutu?”
I slide the necklace over my head. “She hates that nickname, by the way, but yeah. She’s the one who introduced Mom and Dad. She and Mom were BFFs back in the day.”
“Then let’s ask her,” Jake says.
“Don’t you have to work?”
“Took the day off,” he says, pulling a leaf from my hair. “My girlfriend needs me.”
But Miss Macy’s not home. We check the studio too, but it’s dark inside. A sign on the door says she’s sorry for the last-minute closure.
“That’s weird,” I say. “She never cancels class. Can I borrow your phone?”
But she’s not answering her cell either.
Jake calls Canaan, but the call rolls to voice mail.
“Okay, let’s just figure this out ourselves,” I say. “We can do that, right? We’re smart.”
Jake pulls the car into the drive-thru at Burgerville. “I’m much smarter after I’ve eaten.”
We pick up shakes and onion rings and drive out to Crooked Leg Bridge. The sky is clear and blue, Mount Bachelor rising in the distance, crowning a horizon of evergreens with a tipsy white dunce hat. We sit side by side on the bridge, our feet dangling, and I tell him about my nightmares. All of them. And because I can’t shake the thought that it’s related, I tell him about Olivia’s mom dying in that fire.
With all the pieces laid before us, a story begins to take shape.
“It’s Olivia,” Jake says. “It has to be.”
I gather a handful of pebbles and drop them one at a time off the bridge. I can’t see them fall, can’t see them hit the water, but the ripples they make—I can see those.
“I know you hate her, Elle, but think about it.”
“Is it possible to want to save someone and knock someone’s face in all at the same time?”
“You tell me,” Jake says. “Is it possible?”
“Seems so. What does that mean about Javan? If what I saw took place years ago, it’s possible he’s still in the pit, right? We don’t have to worry about him coming to Stratus?”
“Canaan’s fairly certain he’s in hell.”
The next question makes my hands sweaty. I dust the remaining pebbles from my hands and watch as the river below is freckled with ripples. Uncountable.
“And the woman, then, that Olivia spoke to at the hospital, that was my mom. Olivia was with her when she died.”
Jake tosses his own rock into the water. Big, round. It makes a splash.
“We don’t have all the pieces yet. That might be too big a leap to make.”
“But if you were guessing . . .”
His words are soft, but they still cut. “It’s not a bad guess, Elle.”
I stare at the skies over Bachelor, wondering just what the Sabres’ role is in all this. Was it just to unearth the emptiness of Mom’s grave? That’s why they came all this way?
“You know, for a second I let mys
elf believe Mom was out there somewhere. I conjured up this reality that she’d survived somehow, and we’d find her.” I can’t help fingering the necklace hanging against my chest. “But if that was my mom Olivia was talking to at the hospital, then I’ve looked out through her eyes. I’ve felt the sickness inside her.”
Jake leans forward and presses his lips to my forehead. “I’m so sorry.”
I lay my head on his shoulder. The bridge is warm beneath our legs and our breathing resolves into the same rhythm. We sit like that for a long time. Until the summer eve is wrapped around us, and the trees are stained pink with the rays of the setting sun. How easy it would be to ignore the ugly parts of this world. The broken parts.
“Jake?”
“Hmm?”
“If my mom’s dead, what happened to her body?”
The sun dips below the horizon and the world turns to shadow.
“I don’t know.”
25
Brielle
Helene’s sitting at the desk just beyond the small waiting area when I enter the dance studio on Tuesday. She’s lovely in a pale-pink leotard and tights, her auburn hair pulled up like mine. She’s been working alongside me for months, but it’s still strange to see her here. So comfortable in the Terrestrial, so graceful and light on her feet.
I’ll be sad when she’s assigned elsewhere.
“Isn’t your class this afternoon?” I ask.
“I got a call from Miss Macy this morning. She needed to switch. Dentist appointment or something.”
“Ugh.”
I drop my bag next to a white folding chair and slide out of my boots and into my ballet slippers.
“How are you holding up?” she asks.
I shrug. “Managed to avoid Dad again this morning, so that’s a plus. Have you . . . been in touch with Virtue?”
We’re alone, but I keep my voice quiet. Helene leans forward, her hands cupping her chin.
“I haven’t,” she says. “But he’s near. I’ve heard him. Seen him. Elle, I’m fairly certain I know—”
We’re interrupted by the Sadler twins. Four years old, fuzzy red hair, and more freckles than Pippi Longstocking.
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