After Obsession

by Jones, Carrie; Wedel, Steven E

  Nobody is home yet, which is such a good thing. I clean up as best I can, but I’m still scratched and bruised. I flop on the bed to rest because I’m pretty darned drained from healing Courtney, but I can’t get my mind to calm down. I need a cover story, and I can’t even think of one. How do you tell your grandfather and little brother that you were attacked by a demonic dust storm? They’d think I was insane.

  Even though I’m freaked about everything, I feel lighter, steadier, because Courtney’s face is clean of sores and Alan’s got a plan, and I—me—Aimee Avery—used my freaky healing hands to help someone.

  The place I do the best figuring is in the kayak on the river. I smile. It’s perfect. I’ll figure out how to stop him by going on his territory. He’s weak now, and the river isn’t just his territory—it’s mine, too. I want it back.

  Plus, it has the added bonus of Gramps and Benji not seeing my scratched-up self right away. I pull on a bra, T-shirt, and fleece. I grab a cotton knit hat, which does not make me look too hot, but it does keep my ears warm.

  What I can’t figure out is the link between Courtney, my mom, and the guy in the river. I can understand that there’s this history of death here. I can understand and even believe that some sort of evil is killing people, but I don’t understand the logic of it. What makes it happen when it happens?

  I double-check my PFD. All the buckles are good. The river is smooth and calm, and for a second I don’t push with my paddles, just letting the tide take me where it wants to. A crow flies across the bow. Its wings break the air. It lands on a branch and watches me.

  “What do you think?” I ask. “Why us?”

  He squawks out an answer, but I don’t understand it. Of course I don’t. Instead, I put my paddle in the water and pull myself out of the current, choosing my own course. I decide to move up the river, toward town.

  When I first hear the yelling, I think he’s a seal.

  My eyes don’t work right in the afternoon sun. Light hits the water at an angle that makes everything shadowed. That’s my excuse. That’s why I think he’s a seal. But the thing is, seals don’t talk.

  Still, I just stare for a second, no longer paddling, and my messed-up head thinks, Seal.

  The guy’s head pokes up from the river water just long enough for him to spit and scream at me, “My buddy! I lost my buddy!”

  He dives back under again.

  For a second (that’s all, I swear), I wish I hadn’t gone upriver. For a second, I wish I’d paddled out to the bay. Then I remember my dream: the overturned canoe, being below the water, breath gone. My stomach drops into the bottom of the kayak.

  I blow my emergency whistle and paddle my kayak faster, looking up and down the river for other boats. Nothing. No, delete that—there is something, an upside-down blue canoe, spinning in an eddy. I stare at it and swallow, paddling even harder. The water where the boy dove under is choppy from his splashing. He’s barely submerged at all.

  His head pops up again, wet and oozy from the tidal water. He slams his hands against the top of the water. He looks at me. I’m maybe twenty feet away. It’s early October, in Maine. The river water is colder than an icy shower.

  “Don’t dive!” I yell. I don’t know why I expect him to listen.

  He splashes his arms frantically. He’s lost it. The guy has completely lost it. “My buddy! We gotta get him!” He dives again, a shallow dive, a nothing dive.

  I put everything I have into pushing my kayak across the water, fast, digging the paddles into the cold. Water splashes me, tastes like salt. An eagle watches from a tree on the point. I wish he could come down and help.

  The boy struggles just below the water’s surface to the right of my kayak, swimming without reason, twisting his torso, slowly. He surfaces again and stares at me with wild eyes. His lips are blue. I recognize him. Noah Chandler, one of the guys who pummeled Alan.

  “I lost him.” He spits water. He flails around.

  My heart leaps into my chest. Someone else is in the water. Like my dream. My fault. I didn’t warn anyone. I was too busy worrying about Alan and Courtney to worry about my dreams.

  I look around, trying to push the panic back into my stomach where it belongs. “What happened?”

  “My buddy!” He starts to dive again, but I let go of my paddle and catch him by the shirt. I’m a pretty strong girl, but I won’t be able to hold Noah for too long, even though he is weak from fear and being in the water. Adrenaline has run out and left him. He’s in the river, and it’s not just the cold that might get him. Old-fashioned newspaper headlines flash in front of my eyes, details of deaths, men with scratches around their wrists, bodies dismembered.

  “You’ve got to get out of the water!” I tell him, barely hanging on. “Now. You have to get to shore.”

  I point my paddle toward the river grass and mud flats, a good fifty feet away.

  He grabs the kayak near the bow, rocking it. I lean the other way to keep from going over. “Grab with both arms. I’ll take you in, then look for your friend.”

  He doesn’t move, but his eyes fill with hate. He stares at me. I am turning frantic now, too. I have to find the other boy. The eagle spreads its wings, swoops above us, and then down the river. Seconds pass. Time wasted when the person underneath the water might be dying. Noah doesn’t say anything, but his arms wrap around my bow and I paddle in to shore.

  He crawls onto the land. He doesn’t shiver. He is past shivering. His jeans and shirt are wet and drag him down. I pull off my life jacket and my fleece and give the fleece to him.

  “You need to stay warm,” I say. I yank the emergency blanket out of the wet bag my dad stores in the kayak. I throw it over him.

  He doesn’t look up. He puts his head in his hands, hiding, and his voice comes out in a croak, “My buddy …”

  “I’m going to call for help.” I do it as fast as I can. I have to get back on the water and look for the other guy. I call 911 on my ugly little cell phone and tell them where we are, then smash back into my life jacket, zipping it up, thanking God for my dad always insisting on being prepared, bringing a cell phone, bringing a whistle. I look at the boy. He was Noah Chandler: my age, hanging out with Blake, beating up Alan, and being a certified tool, but now I can only think of him as a boy. He is sobbing, sobbing. The sky above us is cloudless and beautiful.

  “I’ve got to go back out there. I gotta get my buddy,” he mumbles, shaking his head, trying to stand up, but unable to make it. His lips shake.

  I put my hand on his chest to make him stay put, and the wetness of it chills my hand. Then I hop into the kayak. “I’ll go. You stay here. Help is coming.”

  I have to use the paddle to push off the muck. I turn the kayak back into the river and I look and look, but the water is not clear. It’s muddy and I can’t see far. Eel grass covers some of the river bottom. Old lumber from logging and shipbuilding obscures other parts.

  I blow my whistle. That will help them find us, although nobody really uses the river in October. Still, I called 911. The Coast Guard will come with divers. The harbormaster will come down the river from Ellsworth. They will all come to rescue the boy, but I know, just like his friend knows: he is already gone. The river took him. The river took my mother. No, not the river, the man from the river, the man of the river, him.

  “Help!” I yell.

  Yelling is no good.

  I blow the whistle again—long, short, long. I don’t know if this is the SOS signal, but it’s the best I can do. The eagle returns, landing in a tall tree on the opposite shore. The wind picks up. I blow my whistle again. My hands are wet and cold, almost numb, but I keep paddling, searching beneath the surface. On the shore, Noah Chandler rocks back and forth. Out in the water, a seal nudges his head up and looks at me. I look at him. His eyes are big and brown and sad. He looks at me. I look at him. There is no point in searching, he tells me. There is no point at all. We both look away.

  I crisscross the area over and over again,
whistling loud and shrill spurts for rescuers to hear. The eagle watches. Noah shudders on the shore, and I keep making kayak passes, back and forth, back and forth, until the harbormaster comes, and then I do it with him. He drives so slow, his fishing boat barely makes a wake. Every so often he looks at me, and I look at him. Just like the seal. He shakes his head.

  Nothing.

  I call my dad. I want to tell him where I am. I get Doris. He is in a meeting, but she’ll tell him. I call home. Could Gramps or Benji answer the damn phone? My heart plummets, my muscles shake, and I’m not sure if it’s because of the cold, or because I’m tired, or because I’m scared. I leave a message.

  “Hey, Gramps. Um. It’s me. I’m out on the river. There’s been an accident. I found a boy in the water. The other one’s still missing … I’m going to be late for dinner … But, um, don’t worry, the police are—”

  BEEeeeppp.

  The answering machine cuts me off. Our answering machine does not like long messages. Neither does my dad.

  The Goffstown police arrive. They had to get a fireman to launch his private boat so that they could get down the river. They ask me questions. Well, just one of them, the tall one from Florida, Sgt. Farrar.

  “Now, sweetheart,” he says, leaning over the side of the boat while I float next to it, holding on to the gunnels so the tide doesn’t take me away. “I’m gonna have to ask ya more questions later, but can you tell me real quick what’s happened?”

  And I tell him.

  “Do you know either of these boys?”

  I shake my head, which is kind of lying. “I don’t even know who the other boy is. I didn’t ask his name.”

  But I do know who he is. He’s Chris Paquette, the other guy who beat on Alan with Blake. It has to be.

  “Ever met the other one? Noah? See him at school? At the skate park?”

  The skate park? I reposition my fingers; they are stiff and blue, like dead things. I look up at the officer, and when I do I see past him to the never-ending sky.

  “Yeah. I mean I know Noah. He’s friends with my ex-boyfriend. He’s on cross-country.” My voice shakes.

  Noah’s still huddled there on the shore, alone. No one is taking care of him, and he looks so cold. I had the dream because I was supposed to protect him. I was supposed to protect both of them. I did a horrible job; a horrible, horrible job.

  My dad comes at the same time as the Coast Guard. Our red tandem kayak plows around a curve in the river. I’ve never seen him paddle so fast. His paddles smash through the water, each stroke pulling him closer to me.

  Normally, he paddles slowly, stops, watches for eagles, for seals, tries to understand the currents. I tease him that he’s not getting much of a workout, and he always says something corny like, “Not all workouts are for the body. Some are for the soul.”

  It is so good to see him. He zips his kayak right next to mine and leans over, grabbing at my arm and whispering, “Oh, honey …”

  The Coast Guard takes over. They make a grid pattern using sonar equipment. Then they start diving. That frees up the police department to talk to Noah. He looks skinny and pale, rocking back and forth on the shore between the big men in their yellow firefighting coats. They load him into the boat and take off for the town pier.

  The shore seems empty, just tree after tree standing tall and crooked, bearing witness while my dad and I decide to search downriver, away from the Coast Guard.

  “Maybe he’s on the shore somewhere,” I say, even though I know better. “Maybe he’s just exhausted and on the shore.”

  My dad nods. He gives me sad eyes. We both know that I’m making things up, just believing what I want to believe and not what my gut rumbles at me. We glide, letting the river take us. “We’ll follow the current the way it would have taken him,” Dad says, pushing his baseball cap over his head.

  “Would that work?” I ask. “Is the current the same on the top of the river and the underneath part?”

  He scrubs a hand across his face and rubs at his cheeks. “Usually.”

  The river takes us away. It takes us far, and quickly. The river is tidal. Its movements can be swift and deep.

  Swallowing, I adjust my grip on the paddles and say, “I think things are really, really messed up.”

  One of his hands leaves his paddle and he leans over to grab the side of my kayak, hanging on to me so that neither of us floats away from the other. “Because?”

  “People are dying on the river.”

  He repeats it. “People are dying on the river.”

  “It’s—” I start to explain.

  “I know what you’re saying,” he interrupts. “But I think you’re leaping to conclusions here, Aimee.”

  “I know you don’t want to believe it’s true, but Dad, Mrs. Hessler showed me all these newspaper articles, and there’ve been all these weird deaths on this river over and over again. Maybe this whole place is cursed or something.”

  He lets go of my kayak and says, “I love you, Aimee. I just want what’s best for you, but sometimes, it’s so hard.”

  I nod. The current ripples the water, moving it one direction, then another.

  Finally he says, “Do you still have those dreams?”

  “Yeah.” My voice is super quiet, so quiet he might not even hear it, but he knows what I’ve said.

  “Did you dream this?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. It’s why I don’t want to sleep—that, and I can’t … I can’t sleep ’cause I’m so nerved up by everything that’s happening—the footsteps, Courtney, the … everything. I just don’t want to get as bad as Mom was, you know? I don’t want …” Something inside me breaks again, but not totally. One sob makes its way out, and my dad hurries his kayak toward me, slamming it into the side of mine. He reaches out and grabs me, holding on hard. Tears wash his face.

  “I won’t lose you, too, Aimee.” He squeezes out the words. “I won’t let you go.”

  “You won’t,” I say, then I repeat it. “You won’t.”

  We cling to each other, aching inside with fear and love and loss for my mom. But we still have each other. We are alive and breathing and we love each other, and that has to be enough.

  After a moment, we break apart. I reach out and wipe the tears off his craggy face and we start searching again, and the kayak feels lighter, like I suddenly weigh less, like I can suddenly move through the water.

  I think of the river as brown, but that’s not totally true. The river changes color. Sometimes it’s brown like its muddy bottom, sometimes it’s blue like the sky. Sometimes it’s both, brown beneath but blue on the surface, and that’s the way it is when I start paddling, turning my kayak sideways, trying to keep it in place, a horrible sadness pressing down on my chest as I stare into the water.

  “Daddy!” I yell, and he looks at me, stunned, maybe because I have stopped, or maybe because I am suddenly using a name I haven’t used since Mom left us and “Daddy” didn’t sound right anymore.

  “Daddy!” I give a few quick paddles, trying to maintain position on top of the water when the currents try to pull me another way. “Chris—he’s here.”

  He stares. He brings his kayak over to mine and peers into the water. He can’t see anything. “How do you know?” The muscles in his shoulders tighten. “Do you see him?”

  “No,” I say, “but he’s here.”

  He adjusts his hat, squinting his eyes at me. “How do you know, sweetie?”

  What do I say? I close my eyes so I don’t have to look at my dad’s face. “I don’t know. I can feel him.”

  “Feel him?”

  “It sounds stupid. I know it sounds stupid, but can you just believe me for a second?”

  He nods. He believes. He pulls out his cell phone and calls a number. He uses his hospital CEO voice. Whatever he says works. My dad gets the Coast Guard. I don’t know how he makes them listen, but he’s good at things like that. He can talk people into things, my dad. That’s his gift.

&
nbsp; “I love you,” my dad says after he hangs up. “You know that, Aimee, right? You know that I love you and your grandfather loves you and Benji loves you.”

  I dip my paddle into the water. The current ripples around it, separating, then coming back together. I nod.

  “We’ll get through this, pumpkin,” he says.

  “That’s what Alan said.”

  “He’s right. We will.”

  I nod. The Coast Guard boat engine sounds closer. “I love you, too.”

  The Coast Guard pulls the dead boy out of the water. It takes two divers. When they haul the boy up, my father and I watch from our kayaks. My dad holds us together, gripping my kayak’s bow with his big hands.

  When they bring the boy out, I start to shake. His arm is missing. So is his leg. My dad takes his arm off my kayak and grabs me by the shoulders. He pulls me to him in an awkward kayak hug, and somehow manages to not tip us both over.

  Our life jackets bump together, which prevents good body contact. I can smell him though, an indescribable fatherly scent. For a moment, that’s all I smell. I smell him more than the salt of the river, more than the crisp ache of death, more than the ripeness of mussels ready to be plucked from the mud. The eagle flies overhead and cries to us, a loud squawk.

  The Coast Guard boat motors over and a guy says, “Young lady? Ms. Avery? Can you identify the body?”

  My father keeps his arm around me, but I can feel the tension in his biceps, how they tighten. My father moves his neck and says, “Surely someone else can do this.”

  The Coast Guard man says, “It would make things easier. We don’t know what shape the other boy is in. He hasn’t even told us who this is. And it looks like there might be some dangerous marine life involved.”

  “Marine life? How?” my dad’s voice powers out.

  “There are long slash marks around his wrist,” the man says. “Appendages are missing.”

  “We don’t have sharks here,” I say.

  “Not only sharks can do this,” Coast Guard Man agrees. His face shows how upset he is. His muscles are all so tense. The skin below his eye twitches. All his rugged handsomeness has turned into fright.