He leans down and places a kiss on the papery skin of her cheek, walking back to me. Grabbing my hand, he laces his fingers through mine, gently tugging me toward the door. I let him hold my hand and lead me away, only because I don’t like the way his mother is staring at me. My skin crawls with each word she speaks, and I just want to get as far away from her as possible.
“The dead speak, and you should always listen,” Beatrice shouts in between coughs as Nolan opens the front door. “I see the letter T. Do you remember? Do you know? T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER! My husband pulled that little body from the water. He was a hero and he paid with his life for going against evil’s wishes.”
Nolan quickly pulls me the rest of the way out the door, closing it gently behind us. I feel sweat trickling down my back and a sharp pain shoots through my head, stabbing behind my eyes and making me squeeze them tightly closed. I let Nolan blindly lead me down the stairs and back into the woods, moving us quickly through the path until we come out on the other side on the prison grounds. He pauses in the middle of the yard, and I finally open my eyes as the headache subsides. He faces me, and I stare up at him silently while he rubs his hands up and down my arms soothingly.
“I’m sorry about that. The medication she’s on sometimes makes her say some pretty strange things,” he explains. “Before my father died, she used to work at the prison doing palm readings for some of the tour groups. She’s always had kind of a sixth sense about things and your father thought it would be something fun to add to the tours. Mostly, it’s a lot of just reading people and their reactions, telling them things you know will get a rise out of them. It’s not like she actually speaks to the dead or anything.”
Nolan laughs uncomfortably, but I look away from him and stare at the prison off in the distance, thinking about the words she spoke to me. He continues talking to fill the awkward silence.
“I heard shouts and screaming coming from the woods that night. I had woken to give my mother her medicine,” he explains, his hands still moving softly up and down my arms while he speaks. “I ran into the woods and found you lying there on the ground, bleeding from the head. I scooped you up and took you back to the prison. Your father told me to put you on the floor and leave immediately. When I tried to argue with him about calling the police or getting you to a hospital, he threatened my job. He told me if I said one word about anything, he’d fire me and kick my mother and I out of the house.”
Swinging my gaze away from the prison, I look up at him, seeing the truth written all over his face: the truth, the guilt, the pain, and the remorse.
“Your father only gave me this job because he felt bad that my father had a heart attack here on the prison grounds while he was working. If I lose this job, I’ll have no way to pay for my mother’s medication, and we’ll have nowhere to live. I couldn’t risk that, Ravenna, I just couldn’t. My mother is all I have left,” he finishes, a slight quiver of emotion filling his voice.
“It’s fine, Nolan, I get it,” I tell him, resolving him of some of his guilt. Even if I don’t understand the kind of love and affection he has toward his mother, I’m not so cold and dead inside that I can’t see he had no other choice. If my father found out he shared this with me, he’d toss them both out onto the street without giving it a second thought. He doesn’t care who he hurts, as long as his secrets are safe.
T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER!
“It’s not fine, Ravenna. I should have told you. If I thought that information would help you figure things out, I would have, I promise. You already know your father has problems, and he’s keeping things from you. Telling you he threatened my job and my family’s home wouldn’t have done anything but make your father follow through with his threat and I just couldn’t chance it,” Nolan finishes.
“So your father worked here before you did?” I ask, changing the subject before I start to enjoy having his hands on me.
His hands drop from my arms as I move away, but I give him a smile so he doesn’t think I’m mad at what he told me.
“Yes, he got the job when I was a couple years old,” Nolan confirms, walking with me back to the prison.
T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER!
“Your mom said something about pulling a little body out of the water. Do you think she meant the accident in the lake when I was little? Was your dad the one who rescued me?”
Nolan shrugs. “It could be true, but I have no idea. Sometimes the things she says make sense, and other times she’s extremely confused, mixing up things that happened in her life with things she read in the newspaper or heard on the news. I never heard either one of them talk about you falling in the lake when you were little and my father pulling you out, so it could just have been her mind playing tricks on her.”
T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER!