He walked a few feet down his hall and entered his bathroom. I heard him rummage around in the cabinets. He came out with a bottle of antibiotic ointment. “This should help,” he said, “but the good stuff is at my work.” He poured the cream onto his fingers and tapped it onto the palm of my hand. Then he wound a piece of cloth around my burn and tied it loosely. He didn’t move away, though. His hand slid from my palm to my wrist to my elbow.
“I need to go home.”
Troy let me go. “I work at the Glencreek Assisted Living Facility. You know where that is?”
“No.”
“You know Johnny’s Pizzeria?”
Everyone knew Johnny’s. “Yes.”
“Okay, it’s around the corner from there. I’ll be working all day tomorrow. Come by and I’ll treat the wound right.”
“Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve.”
“Old people don’t stop being old on holidays.” He helped me shrug on my jacket, and we left. There were so many things I wanted to say on the way home. Why were we both there? What happened inside? Why did we run? But I didn’t say anything because I had a feeling I already knew the answer.
I was there because the old man was dying. Same way I was drawn to the hospital room when that patient was dying. Same way I was chasing shadows in Mrs. Merkowitz’s yard the night she died. I gasped.
“You know where I live.”
“I do,” he said as he navigated the streets without instruction and parked at my curb.
“I saw you that night. At my neighbor’s house.”
Troy’s jaw tensed, and he barely moved his lips when he spoke. “I didn’t think you did.”
“I only saw your shadow.”
The corners of his mouth turned up, but it wasn’t a smile. “That’s all I really am.”
Decker’s car was already in his driveway. I hoped he hadn’t stopped by to check on me. God, how would I explain this to my parents?
“Delaney? You’ll come tomorrow, right?”
“I’ll come tomorrow,” I said. I pulled the sleeves of my jacket far past my hands so my parents wouldn’t see the damage.
They were waiting up in the living room. Mom was at the window. “Who was that?”
“Troy.”
“Who’s Troy? I’ve never heard of any Troy.” If that’s all she wanted to know, then Decker hadn’t come over after the party. And really, why would he?
“Dad met him at the mall.”
“Oh. Is there something you want to tell us about this Troy?”
“No, Mom.” There was nothing I wanted to tell them about Troy. Just some guy who knew when people were going to die. Same as me.
She chased up the stairs after me. “You look upset, honey.”
I was upset. I was drawn to an old man I didn’t know, at the mall and at his home. And he died. I didn’t save him.
“Did something happen at the party?”
I winced, the memories of Decker and Tara kissing tumbling back.
“I have heartburn,” I said.
“Oh. I’ll get you some medicine.”
I wanted to ask her for my pain pills, too, but they were buried under the snacks in Decker’s car. She returned in under a minute with the perfect antidote to excess stomach acid. Mom liked to fix things, so I gave her something fixable to focus on.
Chapter 9
The first thing I did when Mom left the room was wash my hair. I held my injured right hand out of the water and scrubbed the smoke out of my hair with my left hand. I never appreciated the use of both hands until I couldn’t use one.
When I got back to my room, a sleeping pill rested with a cup of water on my bedside table. I pushed Les Misérables to the side of my desk and booted up my laptop. Headaches kept me from reading the small print in my books. Now, because of my burned hand, I couldn’t even write. But I had other ways to keep busy.
I zoomed in on the laptop screen, tripling the font size. I scanned through articles of inexplicable science. Brains that knew more than we thought capable. Stories of animals sensing death. Civilizations untouched by technology that could somehow sense impending danger.
I searched for brain disorders and stumbled upon an article for synesthesia, a condition responsible for a rewiring of senses. I read about people who see symphonies and taste words. Who think a C-sharp is red and an A-flat is blue. Who think “happy” tastes salty and “sky” tastes like meatloaf. I think “death” tastes like Swiss cheese. Sharp and dry and pungent.
Could that have happened to my brain? Did neurons forge new paths, cross each other, register in different areas? Was the ability to sense death buried inside everyone? Maybe people just didn’t know how to tap into it. Had I become more than any human should ever be?
And how had Troy tapped into this ability?
I typed “Troy Varga” into the search engine. I got hit after hit of social networking pages, though none of the pictures looked like him. I got high school sporting events highlights. I read the details, compared the years to his age, came up empty. I scanned the grainy pictures for any of his likeness. And even though my head had officially begun to hurt, I kept going.
I found him at three a.m. A team baseball photo. He was darker. He wore pinstripes. He leaned on a bat. He smiled an open smile I hadn’t seen before. He was blurry, his features undefined, but I could see the blue of his eyes. It was him. I looked at the source. San Diego Gazette, three years ago. The headline, “Shelton Oaks Wins the Championship.”
I closed my eyes and flashed back to the first time I saw Troy in the library. How I asked whether he knew about comas. I remembered what Janna said about printing the names of minors in the paper, so I tried a new search. “San Diego, Shelton Oaks, coma.”
There was only one link, and it was over two years old. FAMILY FOUND IN DITCH. I almost couldn’t bring myself to click on it.
47-year-old Jay Varga and his wife, Nancy, 46, were found dead in their car off of Hutton Road yesterday afternoon. Their daughter, Sharon, 21, was pronounced dead at the hospital from massive blood loss. They were reported missing earlier in the day when their son, a junior at Shelton Oaks, failed to show up for school for the third consecutive day and attempts to reach the family were unsuccessful. The son remains in a coma.
With shaking hands, I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out the scrap of paper with Troy’s number. I dialed. It rang four times before Troy’s gravelly voice answered. “Hello?” Why had I called? What would I say? “Hello? Anyone there? Delaney?” I slammed the phone down hard.
I was wrong. We weren’t anything greater. We had been damaged. Fragmented. Something less. Strip the brain bare, down to its primitive form. This is what remains.
I never did get to sleep that night. All I could think about was death. The smell of smoke. The color of flames. The burn throbbing in the center of my hand. And a cane on fire. In my memory, it bubbled like flesh.
I didn’t see Decker Saturday morning. His car was there and then it was gone and then it was there, but I never saw him. He didn’t call. To be fair, I didn’t call him either.
I couldn’t stand to be in my room anymore. I couldn’t look at my computer without thinking about Troy and his dead family and him living alone in that crappy apartment. I couldn’t look at all the ribbons on my walls without thinking how pointless it all was. And that stupid book, Les Misérables, lay on my desk untouched, stuck on page forty-three. A painfully obvious metaphor for everything about me and Decker. Our relationship: abandoned. Our friendship: broken, like the spine. Everything wrong.
I walked down to the kitchen. “Can I borrow your car?” Mom tensed over the sink. The water continued dripping and water overflowed from the cups.
“The roads are still icy,” she said to the drain, “and you haven’t driven in a while. And with your ribs, your range of motion may be decreased.”
I twisted gently back and forth, but she wasn’t looking. “Want me to do a back bend?” Not that I could. Actually, I was probably fine as long as I didn’t do a back bend.
She placed her hands on opposite sides of the sink and looked upward. “I want you to live.”
“I am. Look, I’ll be really careful. I’ll drive under the speed limit. Promise I won’t die.”