“Son, would you help me over to the sofa?”
“Yes, sir.”
Grant let his old man lean against him for support. He was light as paper. They took slow and shuffling steps together, Grant doing his best to guide him around the broken glass.
When they reached the sofa, Grant eased his father back onto the center cushion and took a seat beside him.
“Hi, princess.” Jim was smiling up at Paige. He patted the cushion beside him. “Come here. I want to be near you.”
She walked over and sat with him, wrapped her arms around his neck.
“Don’t cry,” he whispered as she buried her face into his shoulder. “You have absolutely no reason to cry.”
Jim looked down at his hands. Turned them over. They were long and gnarled, the joints swollen, nails trimmed to nothing.
“How old am I?” he asked.
Grant answered, “Fifty-nine.”
Jim laughed. “So this is what old age looks like. God, I could use a smoke.”
For a moment, the cabin clung to the stiffest silence.
Nothing but Paige’s muffled sobs.
Even the wind had died away.
“Dad,” Grant finally said, “I’ve been visiting you every two weeks for the last twenty years. They keep you drugged and restrained. The few times they haven’t you’ve injured others and yourself. They said your brain suffered so much trauma in the accident that you barely retained cognitive function. Said you’d never recover.”
“I’ve been gone,” Jim said.
“I know.”
“No.” His father’s lips curled into a small smile that Grant hadn’t seen in thirty-one years. “You don’t.”
Jim raised his arms and put them around his children, pulled them both in close.
He said, “You cannot imagine what it feels like to touch you again. To speak to you and hear your voice. To see the color of your eyes. I’ve seen so much, but nothing can touch this.”
“What do you mean you’ve seen so much?” Grant said. “You’ve been confined to a psychiatric hospital since the accident.”
Jim shook his head.
Again with that sly little smile.
“I’ve been everywhere, son.”
Paige lifted her head off Jim’s shoulder.
“What are you talking about, Daddy?”
“How much do you kids remember about the night of the accident?”
Paige said, “I was five, Grant was seven. He probably remembers more than I do. For me, it’s just a few images. Light coming through the windshield. The guardrail. And then after … you not moving.”
“I remember a lot of it,” Grant said. “Most clearly talking to Paige when the car was upside down and she was hurt and scared.”
“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to help you,” Jim said. “Not only for that night, but for every moment of your lives leading up to this one.”
“It’s okay,” Grant said. “You were hurt. There was nothing you could do.”
“I wasn’t hurt that night.”
“Of course you were. I can rattle off ten symptoms and behavioral manifestations associated with your traumatic brain injury.”
“What you visited in the hospital wasn’t me. It was just my hardware.”
“What are you talking about?” Paige asked.
Jim sighed.
“That night, we were on our way here. It was late. I was tired. Lights blinded me—I thought it was a semi. I over-steered, took us through the guardrail. We were in the air forever. You guys weren’t screaming and I remember thinking how strange that was. I guess you didn’t understand what was happening. We hit the side of the mountain and rolled and rolled and rolled.
“When we finally stopped, I knew I was bad-off. I could feel my ribs in places they shouldn’t be. Breathing was excruciating. I couldn’t move. Neither of you were making noise in the backseat and the rearview was busted so I didn’t even know if you guys were alive. I called out to you, but you didn’t answer. I just hung there from the seat and cried. I don’t know for how long.
“At some point, I realized I had missed the end of the game, and somehow I convinced myself that if the Phillies had won, you kids were alive. I can’t explain it. It just made perfect sense in the moment. I’m sure the blood loss had gone to my head. So I started praying, ‘Dear God, let the Phillies win.’ Not ‘Dear God, save us’ or ‘Dear God, please don’t let my kids be hurt.’ The Phillies were our ticket out of there.
“The pain grew unbearable—the physical, the psychological, worrying about the two of you. I remember seeing a light coming through the trees. At first, I thought it was our rescue party, but the light kept getting brighter. It wasn’t a solitary beam or even a collection of them, but all-encompassing. It intensified until everything—the car, the trees—was bathed in a blinding white radiance. My pain vanished, and everything I am—my consciousness, the unbreakable essence you would think of as a soul—was taken.”
A long, breathless beat of silence.
The fire had burned itself out—the blackened log venting smoke up the chimney and the early morning cold flooding in, driving out what little warmth the flames had given.
“At first, I thought I had died. My spirit cut loose, adrift in the emptiness of space. But then …” he drew a trembling breath, “… those first moments. The stars moving. Inconceivable velocity. The knowledge that I wasn’t alone.
“They took me through the pinnacle of a young nebula whose light won’t touch earth for another million years. A spire of dust and hydrogen gas four light years tall.
“We traveled, my guides intent on my reaction to things. To understanding my attachments—the constraints of emotion—which they perceived as weakness. Barriers to advancement. These beings were pure mind, stripped of emotion, evolved beyond the need to wrap themselves in matter. They were benevolent, but their intelligence was terrifying. They exist outside the jurisdiction of space and time.
“I saw stars born. I watched them die. I saw things that will never have names in our lifetimes. That Shakespeare and Van Gogh couldn’t have begun to do justice. Sun-sized worlds patchworked with bioelectric grids more intricate than the human eye. I witnessed the shockwave from a supernova destroy a solar system, and then stood on the surface of what was left—a neutron star no bigger than Manhattan. They took me to the brink of an event horizon, let me gaze into the abyss while it devoured a sun. Even as I say the words, your mind attempts to draw a picture, but it can’t. Whatever you imagine fails.
“They wanted to purge my humanity with the sheer grandeur of things, but it persisted. The resilience of my hope and love and fear fascinated them. They asked what I most wanted to experience. I told them …” here, his voice broke, “… my wife. They took me to a place where your mother never died. Where we never went off the side of a mountain. Where we never knew separation. You both brought your children to this cabin. I chased them through the meadow. We swam in the pond. I got drunk with your wife, Grant. And with your husband, Paige. We all sat on the front porch of a summer evening and filled this clearing with our laughter. I was holding Julia’s hand. To breathe the air of a world where our family thrived, where we were happy … it was something … and I could have stayed, I could’ve stayed forever … but it wasn’t mine.
“No matter where they took me, no matter what I saw, my heart was here. This cabin. This world. This reality. The two of you. They couldn’t grasp it. They’d chosen me for this revelation. The universe unveiled. They had undocked my mind from this frail shell so I could become like them—pure conscious energy—and I wanted to come back.”
“Why?” Grant asked.
“Why.” His father laughed. “‘Why?’ asks a man who has never had a child. Because I’m tethered to you. To both of you, as you exist right here. You’re the only thing that’s real to me. That gives my existence meaning.”
Grant motioned toward the bedroom.
“What’s in there?”
�
��Nothing now. I absorbed it.”
“What was in there?”
“Returning, inhabiting my physical form—” Jim opened his hands and stared at them “—this antiquated piece of engineering … was an uncertain proposition. It’s not as simple as just plugging back into my old body. That thing in there was created to serve as a conduit, a flash drive for lack of a better analogy. But it needed to make physical contact with my body to effect the download.”
“What if you’d been killed in the wreck?”
“They would have taken me just the same. I just wouldn’t have been able to come back and make contact with the two of you.” He turned to Paige and patted her knee. “My darling, you wore that same look on your face when you were five. I see you’ve not let it gather dust.”
“What look, Daddy?”
“Like I’m bullshitting you.”
“You’re saying that was you under my bed?”
“Something went wrong on my return. It was my fault. I let myself get drawn to your energy instead of my shell at the hospital. I came to consciousness in your backyard. That thing is barely mobile, ill-equipped for earth’s gravitational and atmospheric demands. It was all I could do to crawl up the steps of your brownstone. I hid under your bed while you slept. The weeks I spent there, I was slowly dying. Desperate to find some way to reunite with my earth form.”
“I thought you were a ghost. Or a demon. Do you have any idea of the hell you put us through?”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you pain. I couldn’t communicate with you, Paige. At least not like this.”
“But you had this incredible power. There were times you were in my head. In my dreams. I couldn’t leave the house.”
“I was trying to talk to you. I couldn’t let you leave. I needed you. I reached out to you the only way I could, but it was awkward—like riding a bicycle backward and blindfolded. In that form, the one Grant carried in here, I was so weak, so vulnerable, and running out of time.”
“What did you do to those men?” she asked.
“Think of it as installing a program. You see why I needed them.”
“Will they have any memory of this?”
“I imagine their experience will be similar to Grant’s.” Jim glanced at his son.
“Like waking after a dream,” Grant said.
“Exactly. And as time passes, the memory of it will fade away.”
“You had them break into a hospital,” Paige said. “There will be—”
“Consequences?” He smiled. “Are you really going to ask me if I’m concerned that four men who have been using my little girl will have some explaining to do? I would’ve done anything to be with the two of you again.”
“A good man died,” Grant said. “Don.”
“I know, and I’m sick about it. The others were vulnerable. Their guards were down when I broke inside their minds.”
“What do you mean?”
“The region of the brain behind the left eye—the lateral orbitofrontal cortex—shuts down during orgasm. This is our center for reason and behavioral control. It gave me an opening.”
Paige blushed deeply and stared at the floor.
Jim’s eyes darkened. “I don’t know what happened with your friend. He was suddenly in the room. He saw me. I tried to make him leave, but I could barely get inside. It was just a handhold, but it devastated him. None of this has been easy or gone like I’d hoped. But we’re here now, aren’t we? Together again.”
“You still have this power?” Grant asked.
“Only to an extent. I’m still adjusting to life back in this skin. It’s awkward.”
Paige held her head in her hands.
Still staring at the floor.
“But how do we know?” she asked.
“Know what?”
“That this is really you? Our father. We’ve been through hell the last two days. For me, it’s been even longer. Scared out of my mind. Thinking I’m going crazy. And then suddenly this?”
“I know it’s difficult, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. But you know it’s me, don’t you? Can’t you feel it? Haven’t you, in some way that maybe you only now recognize, known it all along?”
“Assuming everything you’ve said is true, what did you think? That after all this time, all you say you experienced, you could just come back and it would all be okay again? You were gone for thirty years.”
“And yet to me it was only a month. I didn’t know what to expect, Paige. That’s the truth, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to be with the two of you. To make things right for us again. I know it’s been hard, darling.” He reached out, touched his daughter’s face with a trembling hand. “This isn’t the life I wanted for you.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks, but she didn’t look away from him this time.
“You could’ve been anything you wanted, Paige.”
He turned to Grant. “And you’re coming apart on the inside, son. I felt it under the bed. Your rage. Your loneliness. The urge you sometimes have to just end it. You’re still that little boy and girl to me, and now to see you both grown and struggling like this … it kills me.”
“It hasn’t been easy,” Grant said. “We had no one.”
“So what now?” Paige asked. “As you say, nothing went as planned. We’re in a big mess here, Daddy.”
“I know, but I have a way to fix things.”
The sound had been slowly building in Grant’s subconscious, and for the first time, he was aware of its presence.
Jim had started to say something, but he stopped when Grant rose to his feet.
“What’s wrong?” Paige asked.
Grant moved quickly across the room to one of the windows that looked out across the porch into the meadow.
The sound was the crunch of tires rolling over gravel.
Sophie’s TrailBlazer emerged out of the forest and moved through the clearing toward the cabin. A few seconds behind, he spotted a white Chevy Caprice topped with a light bar.
Didn’t even need to see the emblem on the doors.
“What is it, Grant?” Paige asked again.
“Sophie. And she’s brought along a Statie.”
Chapter 42
Loose gravel pinged the undercarriage of Sophie’s Trailblazer as it slid to a stop next to a black CR-V.
A derelict cabin loomed straight ahead, surrounded by hemlocks.
Front windows busted out.
Too dark to tell if anyone was inside.
Sophie killed the engine and watched the Caprice approach in the rearview mirror. When she’d asked for backup, she’d envisioned more force than one lonely Statie. Then again, what could you expect in the sticks?
The Caprice pulled up beside her.
She grabbed a fresh magazine from the glove box and climbed out.
Slammed her door as the trooper stepped out of his cruiser.
Crisp blue suit.
Flat-brimmed hat.
Tall, rail-thin, blinding smile.
“Sophie Benington,” Sophie said. “So it’s just you?”
“Trooper Todd. But Bob’s plenty. What’s the dealio?”
“There was supposed to be a black van here. Three men abducted a fifty-nine-year-old patient from a psychiatric hospital in Kirkland. He’s violent. They brought him here was my understanding.”
“In the black van?”
“Exactly.”
“And how did you come by this information?”
“One of the other suspects called me when they arrived. That’s her car.”
“What’d she do?”
“I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
“We gonna go say hello?”
Sophie studied the cabin.
Curls of smoke plumed out of the chimney and up into the branches.
“I am.”
“I got a shotgun in my trunk.”
“This isn’t gonna end that way.”
“No offense, ma’am, but that’s not always up to us
.”
“Why don’t you go around back. Make sure the van’s not there. Cover the back door.”
“When do I bust in?”
“You don’t. Not unless you see my gun. We clear on that, Bob?”
He released the button snap on his holster, grinned.
“It was a joke.”
Bob high-stepped his way through the overgrowth and disappeared around the corner of the cabin.
Sophie thumbed off the snap on her holster and started toward the covered porch.
Mist was forming across the clearing.
She’d been drive-off-the-side-of-the-road tired just moments ago, but now she was fully awake, all systems go.
As she climbed the steps onto the porch, she remembered Grant telling her about this place. It wasn’t the rose-tinted family retreat she’d expected. Or the weekend fixer-upper Grant had played it off as. If it hadn’t been in the middle of nowhere, the county would have condemned it years ago.
The front door stood open a half-inch, but she knocked anyway, her palm resting on her Glock.
“Seattle Police.”
She heard footsteps approaching.
They stopped on the other side, but the door didn’t open.
“Sophie?”
He sounded so tired.
“It’s me, Grant. Everyone okay?”
“We’re fine. How’d you find this place?”
“Who’s in there with you?” she asked through the door.
“Just the three of us—Paige, me, my father.”
“What about our other friends?”
“Gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yeah, they left a little while ago.”
“Would you open the door please?”
Nothing happened.
“Grant.”
The door swung open, but it caught on the floor and stopped after only a foot.
Grant looked burnt-out, confused, on edge.
The dim interior trembled in the firelight behind him. Sophie craned her neck to see inside, but he blocked her line of sight.
“Gonna invite me in?” Sophie asked.
Grant took a step back.
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