It was time to wake up now.
He sat for a while and watched his breath. He could not express how grateful he was that the thoughts of heroin had left him. Now he could really go home.
He closed his eyes and waited.
Nothing happened. He was just a man, sitting on a mountain of sand, completely alone, a long way from home. His mind flashed to a memory.
“You’re never alone,” Jacob had said.
They were standing in the basement of the Castle a few days after Enrique had tossed Blane out.
“If Enrique hurts you, he hurts me,” Jacob had said. “I don’t have any idea why that is. I only know that it is.”
“Yeah, sure,” Blane had said with a sneer.
“How much has to happen before you believe that you are never alone?” Jacob had asked.
“I don’t seem to ever know when you’re hurt,” Blane had said even though it was a lame defense.
“Maybe I haven’t ever really needed your help,” Jacob had said.
“You’re stronger than I am,” Blane had said.
“No,” Jacob had said. “I’m untested. I haven’t been though the things you have been through. Thank God.”
“You aren’t a horrible person, that’s why,” Blane had said.
“No,” Jacob had said, in a matter-of-fact tone that knocked Blane out of his pity party. “I haven’t been tested. I know this, though — I’ll be tested soon enough. And then it will be your turn to save me.”
Blane gasped. He knew exactly where he was. He was near the Sea of Amber. The body in the water was Jacob’s. His best friend and soul brother was stuck in that horrible liquid amber. The knowledge hit him like a ton of bricks. Jumping to his feet, he took off toward the sea. Three steps later, he was up to his waist in sand.
“Fuck!” Blane yelled with rage.
He struggled which only made him sink deeper into the sand.
“Okay,” Blane said out loud. “I know how to do this.”
He exhaled a breath and gasped for the next breath. He blew out another breath. Focusing his mind on the word “So,” he took a breath in. He exhaled to the word “hum.” He continued with the “So Hum” or “I am” meditation until he was calm and his mind was clear.
He opened his eyes to find a red-tailed hawk’s face an inch from his nose. The bird’s head was tipped to the side and its furrowed brow made its piercing eyes seem like arrows of heightened irritation.
“Squawk!” The bird gave Blane an angry cry that reminded him of Mike’s “What the fuck?”
“You’re absolutely right,” Blane said with a laugh.
He tried to get up but sunk deeper into the sand. The bird made a sound that sounded just like Mike’s oft-murmured, “Idiot.”
Blane laughed out loud. Mike thought every person on the entire planet, including himself, was an idiot. There was no cure for it. His grumbling of the word was a reminder that he and whomever he was dealing with were both idiots.
The bird nodded its head to the right of where Blane was stuck. Blane squinted. The bird nodded its head in the same direction again. There were rabbit tracks in the sand on his right.
“But how do I get out?” Blane asked.
The red tailed hawk was joined by the enormous crow Blane had seen before. The red-tailed hawk grabbed the top of Blane’s left shoulder. The crow took Blane’s right shoulder. The birds flapped, and Blane wiggled. He used his hands to push the sand away from him. He sliced his feet through the sand. Very slowly, Blane rose out of the sand. He nodded his thank-you’s to the birds. The crow seemed to smile at Blane, while the red-tailed hawk flew away without a glance back.
Blane looked around until he found the rabbit tracks in the sand. He glanced at the crow and it nodded to him.
“Here goes nothing,” Blane said under his breath.
He took a step, and the sand held. He glanced back to look at the crow and it had flown off.
“You’re right — it’s up to me now.” Letting out a breath, Blane whispered to himself, “I can do this.”
He took another step on the path before taking off in a run.
~~~~~~~~
Jacob saw the Sea of Amber just moments before he landed head first. Jacob prayed with all of his might that he would magically be lifted away from the Sea of Amber. Or that, this time, he’d break his neck on the surface.
Neither happened.
Instead, Jacob plunged deep into the sea. The sea wasn’t as full as it was the last time he’d been there. He saw that he was the only being stuck there. Knowing that he had only a few, precious moments before his mind was consumed, Jacob sent a missive to Delphie and Valerie begging their help. He included Sam for good measure.
His last thought before the horror started was very simply:
“I don’t want to be here.”
But here he was.
Last time, the doubt had grown gradually in his mind. This time, he had no such luxury. Pain and doubt hit him like a ton of bricks.
Jill didn’t love him. No one loved him. And why?
Outside of this awful sea, Jacob had been unable to come up with even one single reason why “no one loved him.” Delphie had asked him over and over again. She’d warned him that whatever he’d experienced would come back to bite him in the ass.
Well, she’d never said the word “ass.”
Like a bolt from the blue, the thoughts and feelings had returned. Jacob couldn’t help anyone. He was useless, pointless, and a waste of precious resources. He’d never helped anyone, ever. In fact, people only said that he’d helped them to get him to go away. He was repulsive, awful, a horrible human being.
He’d never helped anyone, ever. Not a single soul.
In this moment, if Jacob could have killed himself right then and there, he definitely would have. But he couldn’t. He was stuck in the Sea of Amber.
He heard his mother coming from somewhere far away.
“Precious boy,” Celia’s voice said. “My precious boy. I love you.”
She wouldn’t love him if she knew what he’d done. She’d never love him, if she knew how little he’d ever been able to help anyone. She’d hate him just like Jill hated him and his children hated him. In fact, his boys never even bothered to look at him. They found him disgusting, and they weren’t even six months old! They knew how useless and ridiculous he was, how he —no matter how hard he tried — couldn’t ever help anyone.
Ever.
Good thing he was stuck in the Sea of Amber.
He promised himself that he would kill himself. It would be the first thing he was going to do the moment he got out of this place. He would never, ever forget what a loser he was.
Never.
Forget.
Ever.
~~~~~~~~
Thursday night — 10:10 p.m.
Two cups of the woman’s tea, and nothing happened.
Not wanting to make a scene, Sam carefully looked at Valerie. She seemed to be deep in a trance. He saw Blane holding himself while he rocked back and forth. The tea seemed to be working for them.
Maybe it was because they were younger. Their minds were simply more flexible than his. He would have nodded to himself, but he didn’t want to have to drink another cup of tea. Maybe he was right, and there wasn’t anything between him and his . . .
Like the swish! from a roller coaster, Sam felt his entire being rush through time. He was standing in the kitchen of their tiny home in the Mayfair. He and Celia had just returned from the gynecologist, where they learned that Celia was, by some miracle, a few weeks pregnant.
“No,” Sam said. He shook his head. Not a man for a lot of words, he added, “No.”
“What do you mean, ‘No’?” Celia said.
“I will not stand idly by while you kill yourself in order to bring another child into this world,” Sam said. He shook his head again. “No.”
“We’re already pregnant!” Celia said. “You can’t just ‘no’ it away.”
Sam glared at her. He pulled out a seat at the little bar. With angry looks and physical gestures, he got her to sit down. She talked the entire time.
“And before you start with all your paranoid stuff . . .” Celia said.
“Paranoid?” Sam mouthed while trying to get her to sit down.
“You know how you are!” Celia said. “You’re a second away from telling me that I planned this because I like the drama of killing myself by child!”
“I . . .” Sam shifted his body so that she’d have to move toward the chair.
“Exactly — you think that I planned this. You think that I want to die. Well, I don’t. If I died . . .” Celia took a step toward the barstool. “ . . . who will take care of you? And don’t tell me that you don’t need taking care of. We both know that you’re lost on your own. You need me to make sure that you’re all right.”
“Having Valerie almost killed you,” Sam said.
“How can you say that?” Celia asked. “Valerie is the single best thing that ever happened to me — and to you, too. She’s twice the person either of us will ever be.”
Celia was right next to him now. To make her point, her right hand, folded so that her index finger pointed toward the ceiling, shot straight up into the air. He nodded and took a step toward her. This caused her to step backwards. Her rear hit the seat of the barstool.
“I didn’t do something sly to get pregnant, either, bub,” Celia said. “It just happened, even though we’ve been careful after the last one. I am going to have a healthy baby. I’m going full term this time.”
Sam opened his mouth to say something reasonable, but she plowed on past him.
“And don’t tell me not to!” Celia said. “I want another baby. You want another baby. You’ve said as much to almost every person we know!”
“I . . .” Sam started.
“Exactly,” Celia said. “Now that we’re finally, miraculously, pregnant, you’ve decided that you don’t want another baby!”
“It’s not that . . .” Sam started.
“Of course, it’s that,” Celia said. “You want a baby in the abstract, but now you’re saying you don’t want the baby, even though you love all of our employees’ babies. The great Sam Lipson would never tell his wife to terminate a pregnancy! And anyway . . .”
Sam jerked forward, causing Celia to fall backwards and onto the stool. She sat down as if it had been her idea.
“ . . . we were born to have this baby,” Celia said as she adjusted herself on the stool. “I can feel it in my bones.”
“You almost died last time,” Sam repeated.
“Last time is last time,” Celia said with a smug grin. “Don’t be such a pessimist! What could happen this time?”
“I’d rather have you than another child,” Sam tried again. “The doctor said that pregnancy is not something easy or natural for you. I do not want to lose you!”
“We’re having this child,” Celia said.
“But . . .” Sam started.
“That’s final,” Celia said.
She gave him a firm look. Then, grabbing his tie, she pulled him to her. She kissed his lips.
“What could happen?” Celia asked in a whisper.
Chapter Four Hundred and Ten
“‘What could happen’? Are you kidding me?” Sam had thought but did not say. After a lifetime of loving Celia, he knew better than to argue with her about this.
Like some stupid movie, the vision shifted into a montage of horror. Visions of Celia vomiting blood until she had to get transfusions at the hospital, where the ER doctors told her that the pregnancy was killing her. Sam begged her to terminate, but she insisted. Day by day, Sam was sure he was losing her. The first trimester ended, and they told themselves that they were through the worst of it. At four months, the child could press against Celia’s uterus. At five months, Delphie moved into their house so that she could communicate encourage the child not to kill its host, his beloved wife. At six months, Celia was on bedrest, and Delphie was in the bed with her.
Their entire lives fell to Sam. He was husband, father, and corporate chief. Because this baby exaggerated their poverty, he often bid jobs only to do the work himself late into the night. Countless times, he picked Valerie up at school to bring her to a worksite where she sat on his lap “helping him.” He started jobs the moment he was able and worked until the city forced them to shut down at Denver curfew, 10 p.m.
When Celia was awake, she was white-faced, drawn, and barely able to speak. As soon as the clock clicked over to six months, they were in the ER at least once a week. Celia could barely create enough blood to keep herself alive, let alone feed the creature growing inside of her. They gave her drugs to help her make her own blood, but it wasn’t enough. The home nurse gave her uncountable pints of blood. Everything Celia ate, she threw up. She had lost so much weight that she looked like she had a serious eating disorder.
What could happen? Seriously?
Somehow, by the grace of someone — probably Delphie — Celia survived long enough to get this baby to full term. The macabre delivery started the moment she was went into labor. Sam raced home to take her to the hospital. He wasn’t sure what happened but was in a serious car accident. Valerie, Delphie, and Celia were under siege by people trying to kill her. Sam blinked. He was pretty sure he blocked out the worst parts of it. He was in the ER hospital when Celia and his son arrived with Delphie and Valerie. Bleeding and bruised, he dragged himself to his precious wife. The doctors arrived to wheel her away.
“But . . .?” Sam had started to ask.
“We’re taking her to surgery,” the doctor said, as they ran past him with Celia.
Only then did Sam remember the child; he looked down at the creature on the stretcher.
He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Not this. No, not this beautiful, emaciated, exhausted child. The baby’s eyes flittered as if they wanted to open. The nurse lifted the child and dropped him into Sam’s arms. Unable to make even that effort, the baby reached out to Sam with his bloody hand and broke into a smile. As if he’d been fighting for a long time, the tiny child fell sound asleep.
Sam began to weep. He had not wanted this child. He’d begged Celia to terminate the pregnancy. He’d hated this creature that was killing his whole world — Celia.
In this moment, Sam felt as if the universe or God or Goddess or whatever, probably Delphie, had given him this child, his son. He was overwhelmed with a profound love. In this moment, he swore he would protect this child from any injury. He would defend the child even if it took his very life. Knowing the child would be a weirdo — how could he not be? — Sam swore to teach his son to pretend to pass as normal.
The nurse returned a moment after Sam had made his promises. The boy wailed when she took him away from Sam.
“He has lungs on him,” the nurse had said. “Probably misses his mommy.”
Sam was so overwhelmed that he could only nod. He watched the nurse as she took his son away from him. Feeling someone close, Sam looked down to see Delphie.
“He’s perfect,” Sam said. “I don’t know what I expected.”
“You didn’t know,” Delphie said, with a laugh.
Sam scowled at her, and Delphie laughed harder.
“He is your child, your soul’s request,” Delphie said. “She had him for you.”
Sam dropped to his knees in the hallway of that hospital and cried his eyes out. Delphie stayed with him. When the nurse returned, she told them that the baby was small and needed a warming blanket and food. Because his mother was so sick, they had taken him to the nursery. Then she asked:
“Was it a hard pregnancy?” the nurse asked, looking from Sam to Delphie and back to Sam.
Delphie had laughed.
The vision spun through the days of Sam and Jacob’s life together. Walking. Running. Football practice. Crying over the Rockies seasons. Bikes, motocross, motorbikes, ATVs. Track. Sex. Ultimate Frisbee. Hunting in the freezing fucking
cold. Sports on television. Cheering at Bronco games. Girls. Crawling. Cars. They laughed and cried together. Jacob had picked up a hammer when he was less than six months old. During the summers, he apprenticed to become a carpenter like his father. They were close, honest to a fault with each other — they were father and son.
Jacob was the missing piece in their lives. Valerie continued to be smarter, kinder, and more beautiful than any of them. Celia healed from their pregnancy to build the largest woman-owned construction company in the state. She started the Marlowe School, which won award after award.
If Sam could have imagined a perfect life, he was now living it. Celia was happy. Sam was happy. Delphie lived with them. And their children grew.
And then, as if a bill for all of that happiness came due, Celia got sick.
Like a precious crystal bowl, everything broke apart.
Valerie drifted away. Celia forced Sam to marry Tiffanie and her endless problems. Delphie stayed close to Celia, which led to buying the monstrosity of the Castle. When Celia and Delphie weren’t there, Jacob and Sam worked on the Castle. Jacob found the birch room, and Sam made it perfect for Celia. Sam never lost Jacob, even for a moment, since the doctor had dropped him into his arms that day at the hospital.
“Until now,” Sam said out loud.
In his heart, he knew that if he didn’t do something, he would lose Jacob forever. His heart seized in his chest. That was simply not happening. Not on his watch.
He opened his eyes, and he was back on the deck outside the medical offices. It was cold, and he sensed that it was nearing morning. The fire was large and warm. He looked up to see the grandmother standing next to him.
“Too practical,” the grandmother said.
“I am who I am,” Sam said.
The grandmother nodded.
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