by Linda Gerber
The insurance company had paid for a new car to replace the one that had been mangled in the accident. It sat in the garage, untouched. To use that car would have been like saying that everything could be put back the way it had been, but it couldn’t. My mom was gone, and she was never coming back.
I squeezed my eyes shut tight and drew a deep, shaking breath. She was never coming back. It was time to let her go.
Before I could change my mind, I grabbed the keys from the cupboard and pushed outside into the garage. I walked toward the car slowly, carefully, like it was a wild animal that might bite if I startled it. My hands trembled as I opened the door, and when I slid into the seat and pulled on my seat belt, I felt like I had a tourniquet across my chest, squeezing, squeezing so tight I couldn’t breathe. I put the key in the ignition and turned over the engine and pressed the garage door opener.
My entire body trembled so badly as I backed down the driveway that I had to stop the car and make myself breathe through it before I could go on. My hands were slick with sweat. I wiped them against my jeans and grabbed the steering wheel. This was something I could do.
Mrs. Briggs stood in her picture window, no doubt scandalized to see me leave without having checked with her first. I waved to her and drove away.
The last time I had seen Kyra, she’d been sitting on a chair in the corner of my hospital room. She wouldn’t look at me. I wondered if she already knew then that she was going to go.
She did leave me a note. I found it when I came home from the hospital. She’d stuck it between the glass and the frame of our mirror so that only a corner of it was showing. I kept it, tucked into the bottom of the flowerpot. I’m sorry, it read. It will be better this way.
Better than what? I wondered. In all those weeks after my mom’s funeral, we never talked. I never got the chance to tell her how sorry I was. I’d said the words, of course, over and over and over again. But I had never been able to bring myself to talk about that day, about what I had done. Then, once Kyra left, it was too late.
She’d given me no reason to hope that she would listen to me now, but what choice did I have?
I drove up and down Sycamore three times before I found the address. When my dad had said he was going to call “the desk,” I pictured an apartment building or a dorm or something. In reality, 784 Sycamore was a house. Just a regular-looking house with a wraparound porch and a decorative wrought-iron fence out front. A sign in gilded lettering stretched over the front door: THE GATHERING PLACE.
I parked across the street and stared at the house for a minute, completely confused. And then I remembered where I’d heard of the Gathering Place. It was kind of like a halfway house for people with emotional and mental issues. Some kid from school had lived there for a while a year or so ago after he had tried to commit suicide. A sick feeling gripped my stomach as the reality I thought I knew slipped away. Dad said Kyra wasn’t well. What had I been missing all these months?
Walking up to the door, I felt like I was moving through a dark dreamworld, the sidewalk stretching longer in front of me with every step, the door like a mouth opening to swallow me in the way it had Kyra.
“Hello,” the woman at the door said cheerily. “You must be Ashlyn. We heard you were coming.”
I couldn’t answer, but let her usher me inside. A couple of girls glanced up from the board game they had spread on the floor between them. A guy in a chair laid down the book he was reading and watched us with open curiosity. It could have been any family room in any house—chairs and couches and potted plants tastefully arranged and framed pictures on the wall.
The woman, with her gauzy skirt and tunic-style blouse, was the only element that looked like it didn’t belong with the family atmosphere and Victorian architecture. All she was missing was a chain of flowers in her hair.
“Some spring break, huh?” she said. “All this rain! At least the grass will be green.”
She showed me to a rocking chair in the corner of the room and motioned for me to sit. I did, and she took the chair opposite. I noticed for the first time that she was wearing leather clogs with her earth mother ensemble. Months ago, that was something Kyra and I would have laughed about. I wondered if we still could.
“We need to go over a few rules before we start,” the woman said. “The Gathering Place is all about positive energy. If you’ve come to offer support to Kyra, wonderful! But we ask if you have any unresolved issues, you leave them outside. Can you do that?” She delivered her whole spiel in Disney mode, all smiles and bubbly inflection.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“I’m right here.”
22
Kyra stood in the doorway, arms crossed tightly in front of her chest. She’d lost a lot of weight since she left; her cheeks looked hollow and the sweatshirt and pajama pants she was wearing hung on her like they were two sizes too big.
I stood. “Kyra.”
She didn’t move. “Why are you here?”
I slid a quick look at Earth Mother. She was watching raptly, eyes alight. I decided right then I didn’t like her. “Is there someplace my sister and I can talk?” I asked. “In private?”
“Oh, we don’t—”
“It’s okay, Jane.” Kyra pushed away from the doorframe. “We can talk in the library.” Then her eyes went to me and she gestured with her head.
My chair rocked back as I stepped around Jane and hurried to follow Kyra. “Thanks,” I called over my shoulder.
“Think positive!” Jane reminded.
The “library” was about the size of my mom’s parlor and featured only one bookshelf that I could see. At least it was quiet and private. Kyra closed the door and turned to me. “How did you find this place?” she asked. “Why did you come?”
Now that I was in front of her, all the words I wanted to say fought to come out, but ended in a muddled heap in my head and all I could come up with was, “Why are you here?”
She didn’t even answer, but crossed the room and stood in front of the window, staring out at the streetlight.
“Kyra,” I said, “why are you living here? What’s going on?”
“I don’t expect you to understand.” She turned to face me, arms folded across her chest again. I recognized it from all my therapy sessions as a self-protective gesture. My heart sank at the idea that Kyra felt she had to protect herself from me.
“I understand a lot,” I said softly. “Try me.”
She shook her head rapidly and stared up at the ceiling. “You can’t be here,” she said. “Don’t you understand? We can’t be together.”
“Why?” I took a step toward her but she flinched and eyed the space between us, so I stopped.
She pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt down over her hands and watched me, tears flooding her eyes. Her shoulders lifted and she shook her head. “I can’t do it anymore, Ash. I . . . can’t.”
I didn’t have to ask what she meant; I knew. I couldn’t deal with the visions, either. “I understand.”
“This place”—she looked around the room—“is perfect for someone like me. If they already think you’re crazy, they don’t ask a lot of questions.”
“Except you’re not,” I said. “Come home with me.”
“Is that why Dad sent you?” She narrowed her eyes. “To tell me to come home?”
“Dad didn’t send me. I had to beg him for the address.”
She turned away again. “You shouldn’t have, Ash. You shouldn’t have come. Don’t you realize? With us both here together . . .”
“I know,” I said. “That’s . . . that’s why I’m here.”
“Then you might as well leave.” She shook her head. “It’s . . . too much.” Her shoulders hunched and I realized she was crying.
I went to her then, touching her arm tentatively at first and when she didn’t pull away, I laid a hand on her shoulder. “I know,” I said again. “I’ve been . . . hiding from it, too.”
“We can’t help.” She turned
to me, eyes pleading. “Why do we have to see those things if we can’t do anything to help?”
“Maybe we can.”
She stepped back. “Oh, no. No. I told you. I can’t do it anymore. Don’t you get it? If I’m here, if we’re apart, we can’t complete the visions. We won’t be responsible for anyone else getting hurt.”
“But what if there’s something we can do? I learned more about the numbers, Kyra. I learned how to make the trances start. If we—”
“No!” She pressed her hands over her ears and paced across the room. “I don’t want to hear this.”
“Please,” I said, following her. “Just listen. We’ve never been able to change the events we saw before, so the trances kept coming. But I think there’s a way we can make things right. I think if we can just complete this one vision and—”
“No.”
“If we can do what we’re meant to do, I think we can make them stop.”
She shook her head.
“Kyra, please.” We were both sobbing now. “I can’t do this on my own. I need your help.”
She stared at me as if I hadn’t spoken.
I grabbed her arm and shook it. “It’s a friend of mine, Kyra. Have you been seeing him, too? The guy on the motorcycle? I need to know what you saw, what you wrote. I need to warn him.”
“I . . . haven’t seen enough to help you.”
“Then I need you to see it again. Any details you can remember, any hints—”
She pulled away from me and directed her stare across the room. “That’s not how it works,” she said. “We can’t just summon a trance because we want to.”
“But I have,” I said. “Just focus on the energy and pick up the pen to write. I swear; it’s that easy. But I can only see the part I was meant to see. We need to put the pieces together. Please, Kyra. This could be our chance to make things right.”
Her eyes were haunted when she turned to me. “I just want it to end,” she said.
“I know.” I wrapped my arms around her the way she used to do with me for so many years. “I do, too.”
We found a checkout slip and a pencil by the bookshelf. Kyra took them both to the coffee table and sat down before it, pencil in hand. And then we waited.
I sat on the arm of the sofa, hands clasped under my chin, and watched her. She stared at the paper, as if willing the message to appear on its own. For several minutes we sat like that and then she looked up at me. “It isn’t working,” she said.
“Don’t give up,” I pleaded. “Maybe start writing something and it will come.”
She just stared at me like I was insane and I thought maybe she was going to argue with me again. Finally, though, she turned back to the desk and pressed her pencil to the paper. I peeked over her shoulder to see what she was writing, but it looked like nothing more than scribbles and scratches.
Then suddenly she stopped. Her shoulders tensed up and her posture went rigid. Her eyes rolled upward as the pencil began to move again. I held my breath. The trance had begun.
23
It was odd to see the writing from an outsider’s perspective; I had always been the one writing. For the first time, I understood why my mom had been so upset about it as we grew older. I hate to use the word creepy, but the intensity of Kyra’s movement paired with the blank look in her eyes came pretty close. Each number she wrote seemed to take intense effort to form. The point of the pencil pressed down so hard that it nearly tore through the paper. But slowly, slowly, I watched the numbers emerge.
And then, nothing. Her hand stopped moving. She lifted it from the page and then her whole body began to tremble.
“Gaah!” She came out of it like she had burst through a wall, throwing the pencil away from her and gasping like she’d just spent the last four minutes underwater.
“What?” I asked. “What happened?”
She turned her head slowly, her eyes coming into focus as they landed on my face.
“Kyra?”
Her expression never changed; it was like she was still in the trance, her face slack, eyes hollow. Still watching me, she stood.
“What is it?” I breathed.
She turned away, shaking her head.
“What?”
“It’s over, Ashlyn.” She stumbled toward the door and I ran behind her.
“Tell me,” I begged. “What is it?”
She turned back to me, her eyes haunted. “You don’t want to know,” she said softly.
“Yes! Yes I do!”
She sagged against the doorframe. “It’s bad, Ash.”
A cold breath of fear raised the hairs on the back of my neck. “What did you see?”
“It’s awful,” Kyra whispered. “The worst vision I’ve ever seen. There’s a crash. He’s on a motorcycle. He doesn’t stand a chance.”
My face went numb. “No. Not if we stop it.”
She just looked at me, her face pinched and wan. “Ashlyn, it’s going to happen. There’s nothing we—”
“No! We have to try! We have to change this. Tell me what you saw. Describe the road. I need to know every detail.”
She took a deep breath like she needed extra strength to speak. “It’s dark. Nighttime. He’s on a busy road; there are a lot of cars, going fast. Too fast for the rain. One of them spins out and another one hits it. Then another and another. He rides right into it, Ash. Right into the middle, just before the car behind him—”
“Rain?” I could barely speak. Her eyes followed mine out the window, where fat raindrops splattered against the glass. I looked again at the numbers she had written. By now I recognized his name. And something else. I counted the numbers out on the second line and my heart dropped. It matched the numeric equivalent of today’s date. “It’s happening tonight.”
She nodded. “There’s nothing we can do,” she said again. “It’s too late.”
But I couldn’t listen, couldn’t accept what she was saying. I grabbed my cell phone from my pocket and desperately began punching in numbers. “We see events that are going to happen,” I said. “It hasn’t happened yet. We can still stop it.” I may have been speaking to Kyra, but the words were mostly to myself. I wanted to believe it was true. I had to believe it was true.
The line on the other end began to ring and I pressed the phone to my ear. “Come on, Jake. Pick up!”
“Hey. It’s me.”
“Jake?”
“I can’t get to the phone right now. You know the drill. Beeeeep.”
I hung up and dialed again.
“Hey. It’s me.”
And again.
“Hey.”
“Ashlyn. Stop.”
I clutched my phone to my chest, cupping both hands around it as if Kyra might try to make a grab for it. “No. There’s still time. We have to at least try.”
She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. When she looked at me again, her face had changed. I wasn’t sure what it was in the set of her jaw. Resignation maybe. Determination. Whatever it was didn’t matter to me, so long as she would help. “Where is he?”
I stopped. “He works at the mall. He could be there.”
“All right, then,” she said. “Let’s go.”
I hesitated. “You’re okay?” I asked. “I mean, you can just walk out, no questions asked?”
Kyra set her mouth in a grim line. “What do you think this is, a prison?”
“No! Of course not, but . . .” I thought of the guy from school who had lived at the Gathering Place, how he had been under a suicide watch. Seemed like they would keep close tabs on their residents. “I just thought—”
“Well don’t. I can go wherever I want.” She opened the door of the library and peeked out. “But let’s steer clear of Jane, all right?”
I knew the minute I ran through Nordstrom that Jake wasn’t working. Piano music drifted through the corridor from Kinnear music, but it wasn’t Jake playing. The sound was too plinky, too soulless. Sure enough, as I got closer, I could see Uptight
Suit Guy seated on the bench, back painfully straight, fingers curved like claws as he attacked the keys.
I swore and hitched my hands on my hips as I turned in a circle. What would I do now? Where could he be?
“Nice to see you, too,” Gina called. She was seated on the stool behind the ShutterBugz counter, one of her ever-present magazines splayed open in front of her.
I ran over to the kiosk. “I’m sorry. I was just—”
“He came to talk to me, you know.”
“Who?”
“Robert Downey Jr. Who do you think?” She blew out an impatient breath. “Jake.”
I spun, looking for any sign of him. “When? Where is he?”
“He’s not here, Ashlyn.” She smoothed her hands over her belly and gave me a serious look. “But he said you guys had a good talk the other night.”
“Yeah.” I watched her cautiously. “We did.”
“He, uh . . . Oooh!” Her face crumpled and she curled around her stomach, puffing in quick, short bursts.
“Are you okay?”
“Contractions,” she panted. “Damn weather.”
Now I was completely confused. “The weather?”
“Atmospheric changes,” she said, straightening. “Gives me Braxton Hicks. You know, false labor? Baby’s not due for another three weeks. I’d rather not do a dress rehearsal.” She took one last deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “Now, what were we saying?”
“Jake.”
“Oh, yeah.” Her voice sounded tight, like she didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news.
I looked away from her so she wouldn’t see the disappointment on my face. “It’s okay, Gina. I know all that vision stuff was too weird for him to handle. But that’s not what I came to—”
“It’s not about the visions.”
I met her eye. “It’s not?”
“It’s about the accident.”
The wet road. Crashing metal. Shattering glass.
