Chapter THIRTY-FOUR
Jamison woke to the crow of a sick-sounding rooster. A second later, he was hit with cruel joke number one, and number two. Two thirds of the people he loved on this Earth had been taken from it.
He tried to roll over, but something held firm against his back. Cornstalks. The crop circle was gone. Of course.
With little sense of direction in the tall corn, he made his best guess and headed uphill. If he ended up spending the day finding his way out, who cared?
When he emerged at the end of the row, a tractor rolled past him. The driver, dressed in white, tipped his straw hat to him. Jamison flipped the guy off.
He made it to his car and opened the back door to find his change of clothes. Then he changed them, right there, in front of God and everybody. He folded the white clothes and put them in a neat little pile, in the dirt, and...peed on them.
The ladies were standing on the back porch. He didn’t care. Nor did he care how many Somerleds watched him drive over the now-yellow pile, then back over them, then drive over them one last time on his way to the road.
Granddad might have liked that. Or maybe not. But the old man wasn’t around to complain.
By the time he got to the gas station, it was no use. He pulled over and searched his car for his phone. He’d left it in the white pants, then he’d peed on it.
There wasn’t even a bit of change in the car for the phone booth. Hell, there wasn’t even a phone booth to use.
Just as he was trying to remember what his mom had packed in the picnic—so he might trade the attendant something tasty for the chance to use his phone—a pickup pulled in next to him.
Somerleds. Too bad his bladder was empty.
Buchanan jumped out of the back of the truck and walked to Jamison’s window. He considered ignoring him, but rolled his window down an inch instead.
“Yeah?”
“Scoot over.” Buchanan opened his door before he ever thought to lock it and started to sit on him. He escaped to the passenger side just in time. Buchanan’s big white butt missed him by a hair. “You just sleep. We’ll get you home.”
But Jamison couldn’t sleep. He had too much crying yet to do.
***
Seven months later...
“You’re such an idiot.”
Ray grinned as he watched his paper airplane glide out the glassless window to join two-dozen others wedged in the baby cornstalks below, and Jamison was swamped by a wave of déjà vu.
He imagined a flash of brilliant red and yellow leaves covering the ground between tall drying stalks, a smattering of magazine-page airplanes adding to the chaos. Though considering all the times they’d sat up there in the tree house as kids, doing just what they were doing, it was no wonder he’d witnessed this scene before.
His memory blinked and he saw a crop circle superimposed on the field ablaze with afternoon light, but he knew there was only one time of day when most crop circles appeared...and disappeared. Three a.m., the exact hour he’d awakened every night for the past seven months. It was the hour when spirits moved between Heaven and Earth, or so he’d been told. Nurses at his granddad’s Recovery Center had confirmed that more often than not, a patient died between the hours of three and four in the morning.
Jamison believed some spirit brushed past him at that hour every night. He’d sit up, heart racing, eyes and ears straining to catch any little disturbance in the air. It had been getting worse lately. He could swear someone was thumping on him, trying to wake him up. Every night. Like clockwork.
Nothing ever happened. He’d get a drink of water and go back to bed, never feeling the presence again. Was it Granddad? Or was it a young girl in white, forever in white, dancing in his dreams, waking him with a kiss, then gone?
More like a bum internal clock, reset last fall, never to be reset again.
He’d known it was going to be hard to live without her. Bad days were expected, but when those bad times hit—bending him in half with a thought, his lungs collapsing from the weight of his heavy heart—he couldn’t imagine them ever re-inflating, or ever again being able to stand straight.
He was so tired all the time. What he wouldn’t give for a full night’s rest. A quiet house, a wood-burning stove, and a soft plaid blanket. But those things would only invite ghosts, memories draped in white. Better a dark motel room, a knocking radiator, and a broken clock, stuck on eight p.m.
What he wouldn’t take was another thing. His mom had tried to get him to try anti-depressants, but he wouldn’t do it. What he felt was a deeper problem than a couple of imbalanced chemicals. Could those drugs drain a hundred pounds from his heart or fill in the gaps of his bones where Skye should be?
Yeah, he remembered her name, though every time he said or thought it, a pain, fast as electricity and mean as a dull blade, would shoot through him. No. Better to remember her as the young girl in white, always in white, dancing around in his dreams.
“You lied to her,” Lucas had accused, the day after Buchanan had poured him out of his car and into his mother’s arms. “I was told you’d be coming to see me, to have alterations made to your memory.”
“I promised I’d come talk to you, and I have. We won’t discuss...her...again.”
And they hadn’t. They’d met with lawyers, drawn up contracts for the Somerleds to lease Granddad’s fields, and left the option for Jamison to end that lease with one planting-year’s notice.
He was going to be a lawyer, and if that didn’t work out, he’d have the farm. What he really meant, when he’d told his mother his plans, was that if the law profession kept alive his painful memories, he’d drop it like a freaking hot potato.
“I still think they’re aliens.” Ray said, bringing Jamison’s mind back to the tree house.
Jamison was confused. “When did you say they were aliens?”
Ray’s brow wrinkled and he shook his head. “I’ve always said it. Maybe not Skye.”
Pain! Breathe. Breathe.
“Of course, you got to know her a lot better than I did.” Ray looked at him and set down his airplane. “Hey man, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up. My bad.”
“I’m fine,” Jamison chuckled. “It was a long time ago. I can hardly remember what she looks like anymore.”
“You don’t have a picture of her?”
“No. We were only, like, together for about a week or so.”
Lies. He knew every curve of her face, every flaw in her iris, and he knew to the minute how much time they’d had together. When you’re in mourning, calculators are very distracting.
“Here.” Ray was sliding something from his wallet. “You can have this. We went to breakfast the day of your grandpa’s funeral. I got a couple of pics with my phone.”
The pain arced through him again, catching on his heart, giving it a good zap until he noticed what Ray was holding out to him. A photo. A flash of someone in white. Jamison couldn’t make his arm move, afraid of the monster sizzle he might get if he focused.
“Go on, take it. I can print off another one.” Ray picked up Jamison’s hand and slid the photo between his fingers, then picked up his airplane and sent it on its spy mission into the corn.
“They’re not—” Jamison cleared his throat. “They’re not aliens, man. They’re just a bunch of farmers without the guts to face the real world, that’s all.”
Ray grinned. “I like that. Makes me feel like I’m braver than some at least.”
“Hey, kicking an addiction makes you braver than almost everyone, dude.”
Ray’s brows went up. “You sound like Skye.”
Pain. And this time it went on and on while Ray made more airplanes. Jamison figured, since it couldn’t get much worse, he may as well look at the picture and get it over with all at once. His heart couldn’t break into smaller pieces than it already had. It was just a glob of bloody ice chips as it was.
He looked down at his hand. Couldn’t tell. Turned the thick paper and held it closer.
He’d been wrong. His heart could shatter further, and did.
When Ray finally got hungry and left, Jamison was relieved. He had a face to stare at...
...and a stake-out to plan.