When Maggie again became aware, she was lying across the front seat of the pink Cadillac. For a minute she didn’t know where she was, or more specifically, when she was. The pain that had been held at bay by time or adrenaline was now almost unbearable, and the seat beneath her was slick with blood. She eased herself to a sitting position, and her head spun and unconsciousness rose to claim her again. She protested loudly, crying out against oblivion’s lure. She struggled to maintain her grip on reality, whatever that was, and find a clue as to where she had landed.
“I’m in 2011,” she moaned, seeing the blackened shell of Honeyville High School through the car’s front window. The silk trees that lined the Prom’s dance floor stood like a sentinel between the hope of before and the despair of after. Her small purse and her phone lay on the floor where she had tossed them earlier. She stretched, whimpering, and wrapped her left hand around the shiny gadget. She pressed the button to turn it on, breathing through clenched teeth. It lit up briefly and then gave the cascading tones of shut-down mode. It was dead. Maggie moaned again, lying back against the seat, pressing her palm against the flow of blood below her right shoulder. Her dress was useless, the fabric completely unsuitable to staunch its flow. The flesh of her palm would have to do, but it hurt too much to press as tightly as she should.
She was in trouble. And she was too tired and heartbroken to care. The image of Johnny, bloody and motionless, with Roger Carlton lying in a twisted heap at his side, filled her head, and she turned her face into the seat, letting her tears flow with the blood that wouldn’t be stemmed.
Suddenly, the passenger side door was wrenched open. Maggie lifted her head wearily, unable to find the energy for surprise. Johnny was framed in the opening, moonlight at his back.
“Johnny?” Maggie whimpered in disbelief.
“Maggie!” Johnny flipped the key in the Caddie’s ignition, illuminating Maggie where she huddled against the seat.
“Come on, baby! We’ve got to get you to the hospital.” His hair was disheveled, his white sports coat abandoned, his dress shirt untucked, and his tie dangling.
“Why does Heaven hurt so much?” Maggie whispered, wanting to embrace him but unable to move.
“Maggie. This ain’t Heaven, baby. Come on, Maggie! You gotta stay with me.” Johnny was frantic, his eyes never leaving Maggie’s face. He didn’t know if she would survive the drive to the hospital. He had to stop the bleeding. Her skin was pasty white, and her body was limp. It was probably a miracle she was conscious at all. The Bel Air was waiting, the engine rumbling, ready to transport her to wherever Johnny wished, but she was out of time.
He didn’t know if he could do it. But he had done it before. He slid Maggie so she was lying flat against the front seat. Then he knelt at her side, his legs folded awkwardly in the foot-well, and then he pressed both of his hands into her wound, remembering how it felt to gather energy, to feel it flooding his system like a hot white light. He remembered it so clearly now. Every moment of the last fifty-three years was stamped on his memory like a prison tattoo, permanent and fixed.
He had been riding in the back of that overcrowded truck, instruments and equipment pressing against him. He had known leaving Maggie was a mistake, and the farther from her he traveled, the greater the overwhelming sense of wrongness became. They were almost to his sister’s house when something had yanked at him, loosening him from his physical surroundings, as if he were tied to an anchor and dropped into a weightless sea. And like water, the knowledge of what had been drenched him in memory.
He was suddenly, acutely, aware. He remembered the loneliness of the last fifty-three years. He remembered the despair, the intense anguish, and yet...the opportunity. In Purgatory he hadn’t aged, but he had grown and changed. He had discovered an inner power and an inner strength. He had developed fortitude, patience, and perspective. He remembered it all. And most of all, he remembered Maggie.
He flew through their time in Purgatory, watching the relationship unfold, remembering the wonder he had felt at her friendship, letting the desire he had felt to join her in life resonate within him.
And then he had flown beyond Purgatory to the final moments of his old life, when he lay at Roger Carlton’s side, at peace in the knowledge that he had saved his brother. He and Maggie had saved Billy. “It is a far, far better thing that I do now.” The words of Dickens echoed prophetically in his head.
He watched Maggie as she struggled to descend the stairs, her blood spilling across the bodice of her dress, her attention riveted on the next step. She was doing everything in her power to reach him. In that moment, he had been well aware of his choice and what that choice would mean. Paradise or Purgatory?
He saw Maggie stagger as she reached the main floor. She cried out his name, and then she was gone. She simply vanished. Nothing remained but the trail of blood that stretched beyond her to the third floor, marking her path, verifying her existence. He knew where she had gone.
Paradise or Purgatory? The choice was easy. He chose Purgatory.
***
2011
Johnny bore down. Maggie hissed, the pain keeping her tethered to the present. He pushed away the doubt that said he had relinquished Purgatory and all that had gone with it. He remembered the spark that had shorted out Jillian’s computer. He remembered how quickly he had healed in the hospital after escaping Purgatory. He acknowledged the fire he felt burning just beneath the surface. Surely something from Purgatory remained.
Johnny called on that heat that lay beneath his skin and gathered it, coaxing it forward until it seared the skin on his palms where they were pressed into Maggie’s wound. The pain was shocking, but he used it. He used the intense pain in his hands, the overwhelming love in his heart, and the bottomless faith that there was purpose in Purgatory, and turned it outward. Light began to seep out from the edges of his fingers, as if he held his palms over the beam of a flashlight. The intensity grew and grew until light filled the interior of the old car and spilled out of the windows. The Cadillac, marooned in the dark parking lot, became a lighthouse to the lost, guiding Maggie and Johnny home at last.
Epilogue