I didn’t have words. There weren’t words, were there? His heart had been torn apart in his chest, by me. What could I say to that? I’m sorry? I wish it had never happened? The words were true, but they weren’t enough. I felt that weight again, the sure knowledge that I would never make this up to him, or my mother. I’d broken something, irreparably, and even if it healed, it would never set right. For lack of a better metaphor, our relationship would always have a telling limp.
And in that moment, I knew not all of my suddenly fateful thoughts were my own. Somehow, in the same way I’d known the name of the bus driver who’d picked me up a few hours ago, I was half-thinking my father’s thoughts.
I clutched my mouth. The taste of salt flooded past my lips.
“Dad. I didn’t run away.”
“What? What does that mean?” Some of the hysteria drained out of his tone. Maybe, even under the anguish and rage, he was still no-nonsense, solve-the-problem Dad. God I hoped he was.
“Something…happened to me, Dad. Now it’s gonna sound,” I rubbed my temples and closed my eyes. I couldn’t say it to his face, could I? “…crazy. But you have to believe me. You have to trust me.”
I watched my dad’s eyes balloon. The fingers on my arms squeezed even tighter, and a pulse of blood ran up and down my broken fingers. My gorge rose at the pain, but I managed to keep what remained of my bile in my stomach.
“You want me to trust—”
“Dad, wait. Please, p-please just listen,” I said, my voice disintegrating with every word. “Zack and Morgan are in trouble. I can’t explain why, but please believe me.”
“I know,” Dad said. Something about hearing their names calmed him somewhat. “They’re in comas. No one can explain. Your poor mother is up there with Morgan’s mom right now. Trying to…comfort each other.”
“I know what hurt them,” I said, and in the lull of his rage, I managed to disentangle myself from his clutching fingers. “I know who hurt them. And I can stop it. Maybe I can even fix it.”
“Lucy, what are you talking about?”
His eyes were turning from angry to afraid. Desperately worried. And it wasn’t about the aforementioned attacker, I’m sure.
“Dad,” I said, letting out a long breath. “Someone who is after me…hurt them. To get to me. I don’t…I can’t explain more than that, not right now. Please trust me.”
I know what I sounded like to him at that moment—I’d been receiving random brain messages long enough to know firsthand, in fact. I sounded like a runaway drug addict. Which I looked like, in fact. I took Heroin chic to a whole new level.
“Lucy, I think you’re sick,” my dad whispered.
I clenched my fist, and felt another hot trail singe the ice from my cheek.
“Dad—”
He grabbed me by the upper arm and dragged me away from the car. I staggered along behind him, frozen in more ways than one. How could I stop him? How could I explain that if I didn’t make my run against Abraham, if I didn’t go into that hospital right now, people could be killed or worse and every one of them would be my fault?
“Dad!” I said, tugging at his arm.
He spun toward me. His other hand was digging in his pocket—he produced a slim silver cell phone and flipped it open.
“Dad, wait.”
His thumb paused over the buttons, no doubt either about to speed dial my mother or to inform the police to stop the search. Knowing my dad I expect he would call the police first—he’d always been such a good citizen.
“Lucy.”
He said my name as if it was a sentence all its own. As if it conveyed a meaning I should have picked up on. It wasn’t questioning or stern. It was just…Lucy. With the same tone you might whisper the word “help.”
“Dad, I know what you think, trust me,” I said, with a little pathetic laugh I knew would be lost on him. “But I’m not…well it doesn’t matter what I’m not. But if you ever trusted me at all, ever, if you ever thought your daughter was smart or useful or reliable…you have to let me go back into that hospital. If I don’t…you might regret it forever, even if you don’t understand what I’m saying right now.”
Dad watched me with those hang-dog eyes…and his wheels turned. It made a little bright hot spark of hope sizzle up in my chest, and I took half a breath. When I let it out, a puff of frost hissed out of my lips.
“Lucy, honey,” he said. “It’s time to go home.”
My eyes closed, but they did little to dam up the tears. I clenched my fist, and I grabbed his wrist with my good hand. He hissed and looked down at me in shock—his arm felt like it was running on magma instead of blood. I imagine he felt quite the opposite from my icy fingers.
“Lucy! Jesus!”
I looked him in the eye, and I knew what I had to do. Or maybe, what I had to try to do. I love my dad more than life itself…but that only applied to my life. I couldn’t afford to give away the lives of other people for that love. I didn’t have the right.
“Daddy,” I said, and I closed my eyes. “Give me a kiss, and I’ll go home with you.”
I heard him suck in another breath. It was an odd request—he hadn’t kissed me since I was eleven. Something about turning into a little miniature woman probably gave him the creeps or made him feel like a perv.
“Please,” I whispered, between frost-covered lips. “Then I’ll go, okay?”
I watched him lean down, and hesitate—I’m sure he thought it was the desperate urge of a high-out-of-her-mind potential drop-out. But like any good father, he couldn’t deny me. He pressed his flaming lips against mine—just a little peck. An I-love-you-baby peck. It was enough.
I sucked air until I felt my ribs creak. I thought of two things as I did, praying to God it would work. I thought of all the pain I’d given him because of my disappearance. Then I thought of this meeting, when he’d first grabbed me around the arm and seen my pale hypothermic face.
It felt like putting a snorkel in a hot oven and drawing in deep. Dry, scalding air seared my esophagus, my trachea, and shot flames into my lungs. My breath double-stuttered from the sudden agony, and I took a step back, clutching my mouth with both hands. My eyes filled with a hundred flashing images—it was a strange effect, because my eyes were open. I could see two different things at once—one unchanged, the sight of my suddenly-pale father, wilting like a flower on a hot day. The second sight broadcasted a hundred different images, flickering in front of me like a broken projector.
They showed me a film of suffering in the space of an eye blink. The hours on the phone, the hours in his car, driving around Anaheim in a desperate, unsuccessful effort to find me. The sight of his cracked palms, shoved into his eyes, his mouth drawn in a half-sob. My mother, wan and corpse-like, her hair long and stringy and unkempt, her eyes dark. Half of her fist shoved in her mouth as she stared down at the coffee table for the hundredth time. Examining nothing with a horrible intensity.
Then I saw our meeting, moments ago, in the very parking lot where the two of us were staggering, overwhelmed by branching agonies.
Heat flooded through me, banishing the otherworldly chill. I took a deep breath as the images faded away, and I managed to leap forward and catch my father before he hit the ground.
He wasn’t as heavy as he should have been—it felt like his bones and muscles had been scooped out and replaced with foam. He didn’t quite pass-out, but he wasn’t there anymore. His eyes were half-lidded, moving in strange circular motions in his head. I managed to drag him over to the hood of a nearby car and prop him up against it. After a few tests, he managed to keep his feet, even if he looked completely rocked.
I tried to distill my panic into something useful. I closed my eyes, leaned forward, and touched my forehead to his. I made very sure to hold my breath as I did.
I kissed his forehead.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope I did more good than harm.”
I grabbed his phone and turned toward the St. Elias sign.
Jackpot. The number for the hospital. I dialed it, and in a frantic tone I explained that I saw a man lying on a car in the hospital’s parking lot, completely tanked out. Probably a drunk, I told them, but he might be in real trouble. The girl on the phone told me to wait right there and that someone would be out in a few seconds. I thanked her, shut the phone, and tucked it back into my dad’s pocket.
I checked one last time that he was stable, half-laying on the hood of the car. Then I turned and ran full speed toward the doors of the Intensive Care building.
I felt the gut-wrenching, run-for-your-life panic before I was half-way into the lobby.
Chapter Eighteen
Grim
My eyes darted around the cold, sterile lobby, trying to find the source of the…what had Puck called it, in his journal? The bête-noire. The relentless, stabbing panic—the primal sensor Phantoms had, tuned to their particular Mors. But as the seconds stretched on, and nothing leaped out at me with a loud Boo! I realized that while he was close, he wasn’t exactly on my six.
But it felt so—I looked up. For a second, my heart hiccupped—I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Maybe Abraham, his ruler-straight black hair hanging around his long sharp face as he clung to the ceiling like a giant version of some sickening white spider. But, the only thing I saw was the spongy-looking perforated ceiling tiles and long bars of throbbing florescent lights. He seemed so close though…maybe he was right above me. In a room one floor up, twisting the tap and filling my friends with barbiturates, or maybe squeezed in a supply closet, ready to leap out like a monster in a Halloween maze.
I didn’t know, but then again, maybe it didn’t matter. I wasn’t here to defeat him, or seek him out. Today, Ms. Lucy Day would be playing the part of bait—I was just the little fake rabbit on the metal track. Just something for dogs to race for.
There wasn’t anyone at the front desk. I crept forward, trying to glance down a hallway perpendicular to mine without sticking my entire head out into the gap. I saw a nurse drift into a room down the hall far on my left, and I heard gentle murmurings down that way.
I vaulted over the front desk, slapped my hand against the top, and managed to land on the other side and keep running without shattering my ankle into tiny fragments. I did stumble, and hit the set of double doors on the other side of the desk with more shoulder and momentum than purely intended. They blasted open, and I skittered to a stop in front of a bank of elevators. Bingo.
I stabbed the up arrow with my hand, and as it came to life with a soft yellow glow, my mouth fell open. I’d hit the button with my bad hand—and the more I thought about it, I was pretty sure I’d vaulted the desk with the very same hand. I raised my bandaged-and-braced hand up to eye level, wiggling the fingers as much as I could, imprisoned as they were in their little aluminum cells. I felt no pain—just a sort of dull stiffness. I flexed my fingers. Then I made a fist and punched it, hard, into the palm of my other hand. Nothing. Well, the metal of the braces stung the opposite palm, but that was all.
The elevator in front of me—hey, convenient—slid open, and after checking that it was empty, I stepped inside. I stripped off the Ace bandage and the four little braces, dropping them to the floor with four little tiny tings. My fingers were straight, pink, and fine as wine. I flexed them again, as if to convince myself.
When I guessed the source of my miraculous, Wolverine-like recovery, my smile faded. My dad, lying on a hood or, hopefully, on a gurney. I’d attacked him. There wasn’t another word for it. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to push it away. I reached out and slapped the button for the second floor.
The doors slid open within seconds, and I took another long breath. Now, or never? It wasn’t the easiest decision I ever made, that’s for damn sure. But finally, staring down at the remnants of the finger braces, shining on the thinly brown-carpeted elevator floor, I felt as invincible as I was going to be.
Now or never, Lucy Day.
I jumped out of the elevator, both of my hands in my coat pockets, gripping the weapons I’d stowed away. Nobody stood in the long taupe hallway. I glanced to my left and saw the women’s bathroom and a long row of hallways. To my right, the men’s, and pretty much the same. Leaving it to fate, I headed left. I didn’t make it three steps before a door down the hallway opened up. I saw a hand gripping the doorway, and with a tiny squeak of panic, I bolted sideways into the little girl’s room.
One quick, leaning peek told me that no one was hiding in any of the stalls. Determined to change those statistics, I ran into the last stall, hopped up into a crouch on the seat—the grade-school special—and latched the stall with a tiny click just as the bathroom door opened.
I peeked out through the gap created by the stall door and the frame, the same crevice I always stared at whenever I used a public stall, fearing that some great monstrous eyeball would appear and stare hungrily at me. Two women came in…and I felt my guts drop out of my body. That God had a quirky sense of humor, there was no doubt.
The two women couldn’t have been more opposite in appearance—one, a blonde woman who looked just like an aging beauty queen, the other a mom-haired brunette wearing tennis shoes, jeans, and a sweatshirt. I knew them both. The beauty queen was Morgan’s mom—Mama Veers. The momish one, appropriately, was my mother. I tensed my entire body like a gigantic spring, and a powerful pressure to pee came over me. I would have laughed if I’d been in any other situation.
The feeling passed quickly—as it had been a week since I’d needed to eat, drink, pee or…well, you know, I figured the urge psychosomatic in nature. I wasn’t wrong. I took a stealth-conscious, shallow breath, and listened as they began to talk.
“Her dad—” Ms. Veers said, and ran her hands under the sink before lightly dabbing her sweaty forehead, “—I…don’t even know what to tell him.”
Mom shook her head, “Let’s just wait for now. The doctor said they weren’t sure…that they could wake up any second. No need to get yourself talking with Sal again.”
Ms. Veers nodded, let out a deep breath, and leaned her forehead against the mirror. It felt deliciously cool to the touch, a fact I knew I shouldn’t be aware of.
I noticed that both of their eyes were sunken and dark. They had the look of sleep-deprived college students or heroin addicts. Knowing I was responsible for their tears, the Hell that had become their lives…I closed my eyes, and I listened.
“Any word yet?”
Mom shook her head.
“David is still out there,” Mom said, her words gaining strength. “And the police…we’ll find her. I don’t think she just ran off. She didn’t even take anything, from her room.”
Ms. Veers nodded at that, but the look on her face spoke disbelieving volumes.
“Lucy’s no dummy,” Mom said, and unbelievably, her voice rang with pride. “If she ran away she’d take clothes, food, maybe some money. Definitely her computer.”
I tried not to laugh at that. Watching my mom, drawn up, defending my ability to break her heart in a smart way, I’d never felt more love from another and more loathing for myself.
“Are you hungry?” Ms. Veers asked.
Mom hissed a restrained laugh, and I didn’t realize until that moment that it was a sound I missed, “Are you taking care of me?”
Mama Veers chuckled at that. “Taking care of each other, honey. Plus, I’m hungry.”
My mom looked like she was about to say something, but then she began to shake, and her lips clamped tight. I lunged a little—it looked like she was having some kind of attack. But before I could burst out of my stall, Ms. Veers wrapped her arms around Mom and tugged her tight to her chest. My mom didn’t sob, I don’t think she’s the type, but she did just sort of tremble, her eyes squeezed shut, rigid in Morgan’s mom’s arms.
Then, something buzzed, and both Mama Veers and my mom looked up. I barely choked off a chirp of panic before I grabbed my pocket with both hands, trying to stifle the minuscule sound of my vibrating phone. T
hree terror-filled gropes of my pockets, and the phone’s buzzing died.
“What the hell—?” my mom began, but a braying electronic ring sounded from her own purse. Mom glanced down and tugged her cell phone out of her purse.
Within seconds, they forget about the strange noise that had almost revealed my location. She pressed her phone tighter to her ear, mumbling affirmatives. It sort of looked like her plan was to shove the entire phone into her brain. Her knuckles were white.
“What?” she said, finally, louder. “It’s on?”
Mama Veers held her out at arm’s length, her face asking a hundred questions. Mom held up the one sec finger, her head cocked into her phone. I felt a thrill of panic and relief and surprise, second-hand emotions wafting off of my mother like dumpster fumes. It made me feel a little heady, actually, like paint thinner.
“Jesus…okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
My mom snapped her cell phone shut and clutched it one handed like a life preserver.
“What?” Mama Veers said when an agonizing moment had passed and Mom still stared blankly at the wall. “What?”
“Lucy’s phone is finally on…that was the p-police,” she said. I sucked in a sharp breath, and had the two of them been less distracted, they definitely would have heard it. I clamped a hand over my mouth.
“Yeah?”
“The phone company can track her phone with it on—did, track her phone.”
Mama Veers put a hand over her mouth.
“She’s here. At least…the officer said St. Elias Hospital. Or within a hundred yards.”
“Jesus,” Mama Veers said.
My mind echoed that sentiment. I felt caged, suddenly, filling with overwhelming panic. My cell phone? They could do that, outside of government conspiracy movies? Why the hell hadn’t anyone told me they could do that?
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