I run to the memorial, feeling all the way as if I’m being chased, hungrily pursued by the black orb, by a closing door trying to shut me out of Beau’s world, and Grandmother’s too.
But this is where it all started. Somehow I know that. Somehow I believe I can stop this.
I drop to my knees in front of the poster, my eyes pushing against the dark. I think about Beau’s hands sweeping over the piano and visualize my movement, but I can’t make the veil inside me drop so I can pass through.
“PLEASE,” I scream into the night. My eyes bounce down the bank to the mostly dry creek bed, my ears tuning in to the trickle of water over stones and the buzz of mosquitoes skating across the surface.
It’s like I’m back in the car, flipping endlessly, stomach lurching, tiny voice screaming as we careen into the water and the windows explode in a fine mist of glass. I find myself gasping for breath, reaching for something to steady myself as there are several sharp tugs at my stomach. When my hand touches the poster but instead finds cool stone, I realize I’ve finally broken through.
I don’t know to which world—Beau’s or Grandmother’s or some other entirely. A world in which purple and yellow wildflowers grow thickly around the telephone pole and beyond.
All I know is it isn’t my world. It can’t be mine.
Because below REST IN PEACE, the name engraved on the stone is NATALIE LAYNE.
29
I’m dead.
Somewhere, sometime, I’m dead.
There’s an epitaph too, but the letters jumble in my mind, unread. Rain clouds break apart overhead, and I feel myself gagging in front of the poster and run a few feet before the bile shoots up my throat and hits the slick, muddy grass between my boots. I shouldn’t drive, but I can’t stay here. All I know is I can’t stay here. I stumble back to the Jeep and turn around to drive back toward the high school, Beau’s house, my house, Megan’s house.
I find myself on the stormy gravel road, crossing the little bridge that leads to the Kincaids’. Next thing I know I’m outside Beau’s house—and it is Beau’s house, and the lights are on, but his truck isn’t there.
Still I don’t leave. Where will I go? Where will I be safe when I know that somewhere I’m dead, my body rotting beneath the ground, and that maybe tomorrow morning I’ll awake and that orb will have descended around me, cutting me off from the two people who can understand all this.
I turn off the car and that’s when I hear the screaming. Two hardly familiar voices shouting furiously at one another: Beau’s mom, Darlene, and her new husband, Bill.
Their words are impossible to decipher, muddled by the linoleum siding and drywall between them and me, but I can tell it’s serious, brutal, angry, and I don’t know what to do.
I start the car and drive away, backsliding again into my thoughts and my terror, until I find myself parked outside Megan’s house, my whole body trembling like a sapling in a tornado and my face striped with tears and snot. I wipe my nose across my arm as I get out and circle around the white, columned mansion to the basement patio and let myself inside, out of the rain.
The orb is gone, but I know it will be back. The second I fall asleep it will engulf me. I sense it. This is the end, and I won’t have any answers. I’ll have no peace.
I kick off my boots and pace. My legs and back ache, so I sit on the edge of the bed, trying to empty my mind but stay awake, to not think and not sleep. Hours pass and I’ve managed to conjure a mindless numb, but when I hear the knocking on the glass door, “Thank God” escapes me, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath, waiting.
I hurry to open the door, but Beau hesitates, swaying in the doorway with his face turned down. Something’s wrong: he’s sopping wet, his hair dripping along the outside of his downturned face. I take his hand, and he squeezes mine in his, almost painfully. “Beau?” I whisper.
I touch his face, and he flinches under my fingers. I tilt his chin up to me.
“Oh my God,” I breathe. His lip is split and, though no longer bleeding, still smeared in red. His left eye socket is garishly bruised, the top of his high cheekbone starting to swell. “Beau.”
He finally looks at me, and I feel my heart breaking in my chest.
“Why are you all wet?” He half turns away, face hanging again. “Beau, what happened?”
“Bill sold my truck,” he says.
“What?” I ask. “How? It’s not his.”
“He’s an addict. They’re all goddamn addicts,” he says. “It was in my mom’s name, but she didn’t know he was doing it. Someone just came and took it. Then Bill came home high. My mom was mad, and they started to fight.”
He stops talking for a second, his bottom lip trembling. I don’t say anything; I’m waiting on the edge of a precipice, afraid any motion will shut him up, shut him down. Finally he goes on. “He started hitting her, and I pulled him off her, but . . .”
I press my fingers to Beau’s split bottom lip, and his eyes find mine. “She told me to leave.”