Alex began slashing and hammering at them as if they were an angry swarm of rodents. Tile cracked, pieces sent flying airborne with each successive thrust and blow. Nothing at all left recognizable when he crushed the last creepy-crawly drone chunk just before it reached Sam.
“Alex…”
He thought it was Sam’s voice, then realized it wasn’t.
“Alex…”
He spun back around. Because it was his mother calling to him, her eyes weak as they struggled to regard him. The ash man was gone, both pieces, leaving behind what looked like a dark shadow where the twin halves of him had landed.
“Alex…”
He rushed to An Chin through the flickering light, half expecting the ash man to reappear at any moment.
32
GOODBYES
“MOM!”
Alex took his mother in his arms. “Lie still. We’ll get help.”
“No,” An cried.
“Yes!” Alex insisted.
Alex cradled his mother’s head, supporting it gently. Her lips quivered. The terror in her eyes bled off, replaced briefly by relief until An suddenly dug her fingers into his arm, the nails biting against his skin.
“Go, please! Before they come back.”
“I’m staying here with you.”
She dug her fingers in deeper. “No. Too late.…” She shook her head. “But not for you.”
“I’m going to the police.”
“No!” she said, the hand holding his arm starting to shake. “Police can’t help you. No one can help you. You must go far away, must disappear like you never were because … you weren’t.”
“What?”
“Trust Meng Po. Meng Po has the answers you seek.”
Jibberish, making no sense.
“Take her. For me. Take Meng Po and never part with her. She will guide you.”
Tears streamed down his face, the flickering lamplight catching his father’s face frozen in agony.
Death coming into his eyes.
Across the room, a still-dazed Sam had managed to get her phone out, desperately trying to reach 911.
“I can’t get a signal!” she wailed. “Like before!”
Alex felt his mother’s hand stretch past him into the air and then toward the kitchen. “Meng Po! Please!”
“Mom, please don’t—”
“Bring her to me!”
“Mom, I’m sorry! What, what I said in the hospital, I didn’t mean it, I…” Alex felt the rest of his words choked off by the clog in his throat.
“I know,” his mother said, in the same reassuring voice he’d known all his life.
She tried to smile, failed.
“You were right,” Alex heard himself say, rewinding time back a day. “I should do that fifth year.…”
“Alex…”
“… get smarter. Go to a better college.”
“Meng Po, Alex. Please.”
Alex snapped alert, time fast-forwarding back to the present. The reality, the pain …
“Alex,” he heard his mother mutter again, her voice barely audible now. Alex …
He heard his name, but this time her lips didn’t move, his mother’s eyes meeting his as his name sounded again.
Alex …
In his mind. Her thoughts speaking to his.
What was happening to him?
He let himself believe it wasn’t real, just some horrible nightmare induced by the concussion the CT scan must have spotted. He squeezed his eyes closed, willing himself to wake up from this trance, the same way he did to find fresh pages filled in his sketchbook. When he opened them again, though, it was all still the same, only worse.
Because it was real. All of it.
Alex forced himself to look back toward Sam, who was still frantically pressing keys on her phone. “Sam…”
No response.
“Sam!”
She finally looked at him; she was standing now, leaning against the wall for support.
“Grab my mother’s keys.”
“What? Huh?” she responded dimly.
“My mother’s keys. Get them.”
“Where are they?”
“In the kitchen. Check the hooks by the refrigerator. Or the table.”
She moved tentatively that way, seeming to feel her way through the air.
“Got them,” Sam called, and Alex heard jangling as she made her way through the living room toward him, careful to skirt the remnants of what the now-vanished image of a spectral figure colored ash gray had called “drones.”
She kept her distance while extending the keys downward, keeping an eye on the still standing, and smoking, drone thing in case it showed any signs of life. An Chin grabbed them out of the air, closing her hand on the statuette of Meng Po. Then she pressed it into her son’s hand so the keys dangled over the edge of his palm.
“Take,” she said, struggling for air now. “Take. Yours now. For luck, luck you’re going to need. Promise me, Alex. Promise me.”
“I promise,” he managed, choking up again, although he wasn’t exactly sure what he was promising.
“I’m sorry,” his mother said, eyes starting to fade now.
“Sorry? No!”
“We lied to you. All these years, we lied. This is our fault. Should have told, should have—”
The next words caught in her throat and An heaved for breath, just managing to find her voice again. “Others will come. It will never stop, now that it has begun. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sor—”
She stopped, just like that.
“Mom.”
Alex shook her lightly with no result.