I did not hear the car coming around the bend of the driveway, did not see the headlights carving a path directly opposite me; there was only the terrible sound of brakes screeching against pavement, the insidious crunch of metal as something collided into my right arm. And then I was airborne, suspended against the inky darkness as if caught in a photograph, pinned against the sky until my body crashed back down to the ground, a pile of bones and muscle, breath and blood.
For a split second, I caught sight of the moon, hanging like a faint thumbnail there in the sky, watching.
Waiting.
And then, nothing.
Twenty-Two
I woke to a searing pain in my right arm, a column of fire that traveled from my elbow all the way up to my shoulder. The snake! It had bitten me, crawled inside my mouth. Now it was writhing inside my belly, slithering up through my arm, its pink tongue flicking, spitting, engulfing me with its horrifying presence, strangling the life out of my bones, my lungs. I screamed, clutching at the strange white sheet covering me, and flailed at the silver railings on either side of the bed. “Get it out! Get it off me!”
Someone moved to the side of the bed and grabbed at my hands. “Marin.” It was Dominic. “Marin, listen to me. Nothing’s there.”
“No! It’s there! I can feel it! It’s right there! Get it out! Get it out, before it bites me! Before it kills me!”
“Marin, stop!” Dominic’s voice shook. “You’re not in Cassie’s room anymore. You’re in the hospital. You had an accident.” He cleared his throat as his voice broke. “You got hit by our gardener.… He was just leaving for the night, and he didn’t see you in the dark. You’re in the hospital. We’re getting your father; he’ll be here any second, okay?”
But I was hysterical. “Get it off! Get it out!”
Dominic stepped back as another figure with short hair and long, white arms emerged from somewhere in the room.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you’re going to have to leave now. We have to calm her down.” The long hands pushed up the sleeve of my gown, tapped at a vein beneath my skin. A pricking sensation—the snake?—incited another scream, and I arched my back as it deepened, and then sank into oblivion once more.
I came to again, as if waking from a dream, and whimpered. My right arm was encased in plaster and my fingers poked out like sticks from one end, but the fiery pain had dulled. I moaned again, disoriented, and tried to open my eyes. They felt like leaden curtains, my eyeballs like orbs of fire.
Dad lunged from a chair in the corner, bending down over my face so that I could see him. “Here I am, Rinny. I’m right here. You’re in the same hospital as Nan, just a few floors down. You broke your arm, honey, but it’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”
I struggled to sit up, winced against a new pain that shot through my collarbone, the length of my arm. My eyes were blurry; a crust around them pulled at my eyelashes. I rubbed them with my good hand, blinked a few times. Stared down at the strange blue shape shimmering beneath the bandages around my forearm. My pain. For the very first time, I was looking at pain inside my own body. Why had I thought it might look brighter inside me than it did in other people? Or larger, for some reason? It was neither, just another blue shape—this one thin and long, like a rectangle—hovering just below the surface of my skin. I moved my arm stiffly to the right to see what might happen, but the shape did not change. To the left. Nothing.
“Don’t move it right now,” Dad said. “Just rest.”
I looked up, tried to shuffle through the thoughts in my head, which were flung like so many playing cards on the floor. “What happened?”
“I need to ask you the same question.” His voice was soft, but I could hear the restraint behind it. “Dominic Jackson met me here after the hospital called and said the two of you were at his place. He said you got spooked and ran out of the house, and that’s when a car hit you. You broke your arm in two different places.”
It was starting to come back, but slowly, a fishing line reeled in through murky water. Running down the steps. Someone calling my name. The room. The snake.
The snake!
I sat up with a start, ignoring the shooting pain in my arm. As if by reflex, my breath reverted again to a series of shallow pants. My eyes swept the room, scanning the floor, the corners, under the meal table, the television. I yanked at my sheets, tore back the blanket covering my legs, and then curled my feet up under me. But there was no sign of it.
“Marin?” Dad looked bewildered. “Honey, what is it? What are you doing? What’s wrong?”
“The snake!”
His eyes skittered across the floor as he took a step back. “There’s no snake, Marin. Is that …” He looked stricken. “Is that what you saw? They had a snake? At their house?”
I nodded, sobbing, reaching for him. “It came out of her. Out from inside Cassie. I saw it! It was right there, moving toward me, getting closer and closer. She … it … told me that that was what my pain looked like, that that was what I had inside me.” I sobbed, helpless, overcome again with the horrifying memory. “I have evil inside me, Dad. That’s why I can see the things I see. It’s evil. It’s from hell.”
He grabbed me around the shoulders, leaned in an inch from my face. His eyes were as wide as quarters, his voice tight and clipped. “You listen to me, Marin. I don’t care what you saw or heard in that room, but there is nothing evil about you. There is nothing evil inside you. Nothing, do you hear me?” His voice shook, but it was as strong as I had ever heard it.
I pushed against his shirt with my good arm, refusing to hear him. “But that’s what it said! And it’s the only thing that makes sense anymore! In the room that day, when she invited me over. Oh, Dad, she tricked me. She was doing something awful, some kind of ritual that involved contacting dead spirits. I never told anyone, because I didn’t think anyone would believe me. But it … she … must have recognized the evil inside me. She told me! She saw it! And then she showed me!”
His face paled at my words, his fingers releasing themselves slowly around my wrist. “Spirits?” he repeated. “You were contacting spirits?”
“I wasn’t! She was! I was just trying to get out of there! But she left me, she locked the door.…” My voice crumpled into sobs again.
“Oh, Marin.” He pulled me to him, let me sob against his shirt. “Oh my God.”
“I’m evil, Dad.” My chest heaved and shook.
“You are not evil.” He sat back, cupped my face in his hands. “Listen to me. Listen to me! I know”—he paused, his voice shaking—“I know in my soul that the ability you were given is not evil.”
“You can’t say that!” I turned my head, trying to dislodge his grasp. “You don’t know!”
“I do know.”
“How?” I stared at him, desperate in a way that I had never been before. He had to give me an answer this time. He had to.
“You want to know how I know?” He let go of me and paced the room, raking a hand through his hair. “For an entire year now, Marin, I’ve watched you walk around with your eyes down, hidden behind your sunglasses, refusing to look people in the eye. I’ve tried to put myself in your shoes, tried to imagine what it must be like to have to do such a thing just to preserve your sanity. But the other night in the hospital, while we were sitting there with Nan, I watched you take off your sunglasses and look at her.” He tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace. “For a minute, I thought maybe some kind of laser beam was going to shoot from your eyes. Your gaze was so intense, so full of everything you feel for her.” His eyes rimmed with tears. “I may not have had much of a reaction the next day, when the doctor told us about her recovery, but that’s only because I wasn’t that surprised. Even if you hadn’t had this ability, Marin, the love you felt for your grandmother that night would have worked a miracle. It would have changed her forever.”
My breathing sounded far away, and for a moment, I could not be sure it even belonged to me. “You
really think I healed Nan?” I whispered.
“I think God healed Nan,” Dad said. “Through you.”
It was as if something inside just shattered, and then somehow restored itself, all in one moment. I sank into the pillows and closed my eyes.
It was too much.
It was still too much.
And even if it was true, I had no idea how to bring myself to believe it.
“It can’t …,” I started.
Dad sat down on the edge of the bed again, taking my hand in his. “Why can’t it?” he asked. “Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t make sense!” I cried. “It doesn’t … It’s not me! It’s not who I am!”
“Do you know who you are?” Dad’s gaze was steady, his jaw set tight. “Do you, Rinny?”
I inhaled sharply, not letting go of his hand. The truth was simple. Awful. I had no idea who I was. But I didn’t want to tell him that. I didn’t even want to admit it to myself.
“It’s okay,” Dad said. His voice was tender. He reached out, cupping my cheek against his palm. “It’s okay, baby. I’m here.” I closed my eyes. “I’m here.”
Somehow, I slept. When I woke again, it was dark. The room smelled different, like salt and grease. I tried to sit, keeping my arm close to my stomach, and startled as Dad stood up from the corner. “Oh!” I said. “You scared me.”
“I’m sorry.” He held out a white paper sleeve of fries. “I went to Burger King. Got some food. You hungry at all?”
I took a fry. It was hot and soft and salty. I took another. And then one more.
Dad reached into the bag, pulling out various items. He unwrapped a burger and put it on a napkin, tipped over another sleeve of fries, inserted a straw into a plastic cup. “Here, I got you a chocolate shake too. Extra thick, no whipped cream. Eat up.”
I picked up the burger, took a little bite, pulled on the straw inside the shake. Even my teeth felt sore. “How’s Nan?” I asked.
He smiled. “I just checked on her a little while ago. She was sitting up. Eating pudding. They had to practically tie her down so she wouldn’t get out of bed and come find you.”
I smiled at the thought of Nan elbowing a nurse, getting loud with a doctor. It wasn’t often, but sometimes Nan could get ornery with people who told her she couldn’t do certain things. Especially when it came to her family. “I’ll get out of here soon, won’t I?” I said. “We can go down and see her?”
“Absolutely. And then she’ll be home in a few more days and things can start getting back to normal.”
Normal? What was normal? I wasn’t sure if I knew what that was anymore. Dad grabbed his drink and sat down on the edge of his chair. For a moment he slurped on his straw, watching the floor. Then he set the cup down, balanced his elbows on top of his knees. “You know, I’ve been thinking about what we talked about yesterday,” he said.
What had we talked about yesterday? I couldn’t remember.
“About Mom,” he prodded. “And God. About how He could have helped her, made her think differently before she went and did what she did?”
I nodded, looking down at my hamburger bun.
“The truth is …” He hesitated. “Well, you were right. About me not having an answer for any of it. I didn’t have one. And I’m sorry for that. But I don’t think anyone does, Rinny. That’s just the way it is. Life is full of questions that don’t have answers. I have a ton of them.”
“Like what?” My voice was a whisper.
He looked at me with shiny eyes. “Like why someone I loved so much would choose to leave without even saying goodbye. Like why I couldn’t help her, why I couldn’t be enough to lift some of her sadness. Like why you can see pain in people.” He swallowed with difficulty. “I don’t have answers for any of those questions, Marin. But, you know, I’ve also started to think that if I can accept that, try to come to terms with the fact that an answer just doesn’t exist, I can sort of come to peace with it too.”
He took a breath, studied his intertwined fingers. “You remember that day when you came and told Nan and me about your eyes?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t know what to tell you or not to tell you. Half of me was scared to death, thinking you had come down with some kind of terminal illness, and the other half was pissed off because I thought you were just making it up, trying to get attention or something.” He clenched his jaw. “I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so hopeless. So inept as a father. As a man. Again.”
I could feel the tears coming, and I made no move to stop them.
“I couldn’t sleep for weeks after you told us, just kept tossing and turning, thinking about you and your eyes, and then all of a sudden, right out of the blue, I remembered something your mother told me once.” He hung his head, his lips wobbling the way they did when he sometimes fought back tears. “It was during one of her episodes, when she would withdraw and shut me out, and I kept trying, trying to get through to her, to help her out. But things just kept getting worse, and I kept getting angrier and angrier. We got into a big fight, and I ended up screaming, ‘What do you want me to do?’ And she raised her head off the top of her knees—she was sitting there in the window, with her head pressed down on her knees—and she said, ‘Just love me. Please. Just keep loving me.’ ”
His mouth trembled as he stared at me from across the room. “That’s what I remembered that night, lying there, thinking about you. And that’s when I realized that I had to make a decision. I could either love you the way you were—no matter how weird or strange that might be—or I could shut you out.” He took a deep breath. “I fell asleep, thinking about it. And when I woke up the next morning, I realized that I had turned a corner. I’d made the choice to hold on to something again, even if I wasn’t one hundred percent sure of it. I think in that moment I decided to find a road somewhere between denial and despair. I’m not saying I became some kind of saint afterward.” He shook his head, made a little snorting sound through his nose. “All the arguing we’ve been doing has proved that. But it helped. A little. It did. It still does.” He moved forward, taking my hand in his. “The point is that I had to make the choice. And it made all the difference. You could try to do the same thing with me, Marin. If you want.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?” His hold tightened. “Why can’t you?”
“Because I don’t deserve to.” My voice welled with tears.
“You do deserve to!”
“I don’t! I left her, Dad! I left Mom. Even after you asked me not to.” I leaned forward, speaking with a ferocity that I did not know I possessed. But there was nothing left to lose now. “And I wanted to leave. I wanted to. I couldn’t stand being around her anymore. All her moods and the sleeping and …” I could feel myself unraveling, a thread loosened from the skein. Any moment, the whole thing would give and collapse to the floor, a pile of loose ends. “I just didn’t care anymore. I didn’t. And so I left. And now she’s dead.”
“Marin. I left her that day.” Dad’s voice was cracking. “I left. And do you want to know why? Because I felt the same way. I was sick of it too. I was worn down by her sickness, of not being able to help her, and I gave up. I rationalized it all the way to work that day, too, telling myself that you were there, that things would be fine. But the truth was, I had no right to put you in that kind of situation. I was the adult. I did it because I was weak, because I was selfish. Because I was tired.”
Could I believe him? Had he been carrying this around too? Something so similar, all this time?
“We’re human, Marin. Which means that sometimes we fail the people we love the most. But Mom’s death wasn’t your fault. Do you understand me? It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t ever your fault.” I clung to him, the weight of something deep lifting, a boulder shifting. “The other truth here, Marin, is that Mom failed herself. Not you. Not me. Not God. She decided to give up. That was her choice.”
I cried with him for a long time then, not because I w
as afraid or ashamed or even angry, but because for the first time in a very, very long time, it felt as though something inside of me was starting to open.
And maybe even breathe again.
“Now you listen to me,” Dad said after I had stopped, drying my tears on the edge of his sleeve, blowing my nose into a tissue on the bedside table. “It’s over now, okay?”
I rubbed my eyes with my free hand. “What’s over?”
“The whole thing with Cassie. With Dominic. That whole family. It’s over for you. Do you understand? You’re not to go back there. Ever. You’re finished with it. Finished.” He shoved his hands deep inside his pockets. “I told that kid the same thing, too, in no uncertain terms.”
“You mean Dominic?”
“Yes. Dominic.”
“You weren’t …” I winced. “You weren’t like, really rude to him or anything, were you?”
“No.” Dad stood up. “I just told him that if I saw him anywhere around you again, I’d break his neck.”
“Dad!”
He smiled. “I was polite,” he assured me. “But he got the idea. Believe me.”
I let my head fall back against the pillow and emitted a deep sigh. I wondered how Dominic was doing, what he was doing. It wasn’t his fault that the exorcism had gone so terribly awry. What would he do, now that the buried heart and hidden trinity hadn’t worked? What could he do? There were no other options left. We had to tell Father William to get someone. An expert, just as he’d promised he would. It would take a while for everything to start falling into place, months, maybe, for the bishop to be petitioned and a real exorcist assigned to the case. Still, it was the only way. There was nothing left.
I cringed, imagining the look Dad must have given Dominic in the hospital, the uncertain way he’d probably reached up to pull on his earlobe.
“Marin.” Dad’s voice was a warning. “I mean it.”
“I know.” I looked at him. “I know. All right.”
Twenty-Three
Be Not Afraid Page 21
