After all of it, the cold and screeching, the sight of their terrible, mangled not-faces, a clarity hit Delilah like a warm gust: They can’t hurt me like this, not really. Her scratches were from the things they hurled, not the terrors themselves. Without the house they were nothing.
The sky rippled and cleared, and with a slight pull in her chest and a popping in her ears, the world trembled and then fell completely silent.
It was so silent, in fact, that it felt pressurized, as if they’d been sealed inside a jar. It pushed at her ears, pulling, pulling, pulling away until the world seemed to snap and the breeze returned, coursing through the brittle branches of the cherry tree. The smell of spring in the mud and grass beneath their knees mingled with the burned wood and crumbled concrete. Gavin looked up at the house, and her gaze followed his.
It was barely standing: nails hung loosely from shingles, paint curled in long strips, bowing to the ground. Windows were shattered, the porch nearly collapsed. It looked like it had been lifted in a tornado and dropped in the yard.
It looked completely lifeless.
And then he turned and stared at his mother, his face crumpling.
Delilah closed her eyes, collapsing into Gavin, and didn’t open them again until the sun shone through a window and a gentle hand shook her awake.
Chapter Thirty
Him
She was so brave. He counted seventeen stitches on her face alone, but when she opened her eyes and saw him, it wasn’t panic in her expression or fear. It was relief.
She sat up slowly, looking around, and finally took in his outfit: a cotton gown.
“We’re in the hospital,” he explained. “They brought us here after. . . well.”
Although his memory of the past day and a half was a turbulent mix of images mostly fragmented by shock and horror, Gavin did remember it took a lot of calm, whispered assurances to separate him and Delilah last night after they’d put his mother in an ambulance and driven away. The way he clung to Delilah was one of the few things his mind pulled from the chaos of the flashing lights, the reporters, the madness of discovery.
He remembered begging the paramedic to let him stay with Delilah in the ambulance.
He remembered after an hour of confusion, of policemen and firemen and paramedics swarming the block, the woman—Gayle—brought there specifically for him, to handle him. It sank in for everyone around the same time: Gavin had always believed he’d been there alone. But he hadn’t: His mother had been trapped there, kept barely alive in a secret room just beside his.
Gayle held him, promising him over and over that no one was taking Delilah away from him.
He might have felt a little mortified over his hysteria if he still didn’t feel the tickle of it in his chest and all along his spine.
But eventually, with Gayle’s gentle assurances and Delilah’s parents standing shell-shocked and mute in the background, Gavin had let them tend to his shattered arm while they loaded an unconscious Delilah into a separate ambulance.
“After all that, I passed out?” she asked, looking horrified.
A small smile curved his mouth. “I’d say it was the best time to pass out. I’m actually going to thank you for not passing out sooner.”
“Are you okay?” She reached for him, pulling him close, shaking violently as it seemed to come back to her. That jerking recollection had happened to him, too, this morning, waking under a haze of sedatives that weren’t strong enough to make him forget. “Gavin, oh my God.”