Drawn Away

by Holly Bennett

  “Will he be okay?” I blurted.

  She looked at me, trying to stay calm, but her eyes were haunted. “I hope so. I’m sorry, Lucy—we’ve got to go with him.”

  “Of course,” I said, and then they were gone. I stayed and wandered around the room, worrying. I didn’t really know what it meant, to be in a diabetic coma, but I knew by the look on everyone’s faces that it had to be serious.

  I sat on the couch—still warm from Jack—and started to cry. I wanted Jack to be okay so badly, like I might die myself if he wasn’t. I know that’s stupid, but it’s how I felt. And the worst of it was, I knew he wasn’t okay.

  Jack was in really big trouble, bigger than whatever medical emergency was going on. I knew it in my bones, knew that somehow his condition was tangled up with the creepy little Match Girl who kept pulling him into her lonely, dead world. Jack needed more than insulin, but I didn’t have the first idea how to help him. I didn’t even know how to get to where he was. ’Cause he wasn’t at the hospital, whatever the doctors thought.

  JACK

  Don’t panic—it will just shoot you higher. This is the helpful advice my mind dispenses when I find myself on Creep Street. In my opinion, panic is entirely appropriate. Everything is wrong here. I feel sicker—a lot sicker, as if even the insulin I’ve already injected is no longer in my body. And I’m stuck here, stuck in a way I never was before. I don’t even know how I know this, except that I feel so different, as if thick rubber bands were tightening against me and pressing me against this world. I try, experimentally, to turn around and walk backward, away from the Match Girl, and am not the slightest bit surprised to find that I can’t. So I walk toward her, giving in to the rubber bands, because it’s that or just give up now.

  “Jack!” Her smile makes me shudder. She seemed so helpless and innocent when I first met her. Now the look she trains on me is triumphant, predatory. I hold up my hand to cut her off. It’s trembling so hard I have to lower it to keep from freaking myself out.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to go back home right away. Please.”

  “Why? Because of your friends?” She spits out the question in a snarl, then takes a closer look at me. “Are you ill?”

  “Yes, this time I am ill.” Getting ill-er by the minute, in fact. The need to sit down—no, lie down—is almost too strong to fight. And I can’t seem to get enough air. I heave a deep breath, knowing this too is a bad sign, that I’m burning ketones now, and that without insulin I’m heading toward a coma.

  “Listen, Match Girl.” I’m trying hard to connect with her, to say the right thing, but I can hardly think beyond the crisis in my body. “I know you must be lonely here, and that you’ve been happy to have my visits.” This earns a hopeful little smile. “But I can’t stay here with you. I have a disease, an illness, that needs a medicine that doesn’t exist here. Without that medicine, I’ll die. And I need it right now, very badly.” I risk eye contact, to see if she’s following me. She is, but I don’t read sympathy in her expression. “If you care about me, you’ll save my life and let me go.”

  But she’s shaking her head. “No, no, Jack, I’m afraid I can’t do that. I am sorry you aren’t well, and I hope you won’t suffer much, but don’t you see? It just proves that you were sent here to be with me. If you die, then it will be even easier to stay together. We can be friends forever. You and me and my little Jack doll.” She shows me a couple of tied-together sticks draped in my Kleenex, as proudly as if it were a real baby.

  The lethargy creeping over me makes it hard to think. It’s like my will and resolve are draining away with my energy. Just lie down and rest, my body croons to me. Close your eyes for a while; that will feel so-o-o-o much better. I force myself to focus, to ignore my weird breathing, the ugly ketone taste in my mouth, the rising nausea, and keep arguing with her. Begging, really, is what it amounts to, and it’s getting me nowhere, but what else can I do?

  What finally overcomes me is the desperate need to pee. “I need to—” I gesture toward my crotch.

  “Just go in one of the buildings,” she says. “There’s no one to see you.”

  I heave open a door, step into an empty room—is it a room? I have strong doubts that a back wall exists beyond the shadows—and unzip. A bucket of urine pours out—my body’s feeble attempt to get rid of the extra sugar coursing through it—and on its heels comes a lost-in-the-Sahara thirst. I know without asking, there is no water here. And with that my resolve fails. Slowly, one hand against the wall for support, I make my way to the other side of the door. I let my legs fold under me, and I curl up in the corner. Lying down has never been such a relief. My eyes snap open with a surge of fear when I recall the little doll, the Match Girl’s hairs wrapped tightly around the matchstick figure. I imagine I can feel those hairs like cables coiled around my own neck. Why didn’t I grab the doll and smash it, peel the hairs away? I try to make myself get up and do it now—but I can’t. I’m sinking, black water closing over me, going, going, gone.

  LUCY

  I’m making it up as I go along, pulling from a random assortment of witch movies, YouTube yoga lessons and the kooky stuff I read on the Internet while researching spells. I’m trying to induce an altered state, to let go of my conscious brain so my mind can slip away. It feels completely impossible with my heart racing from anxiety and my head so full of worry. Plus, I have a growing sense of urgency that is fighting my attempts to relax at every turn. He’s dying! it screams at me. Quit pissing around—you’ll be too late!

  Still, I make Jack’s room as dark as I can, sit in front of the candle I lifted from the fireplace mantel, do my calming yoga breaths and try to focus on my breath going in and out, on the candle’s wavering light, on a state of peace. I try to float, to let my mind be still, to accept what comes to it.

  Twice I lose it, swearing and beating the ground in frustration that I’m so helpless and scared, that pretending to be some sort of mystic is the best I can come up with. But it is the best I can come up with, so I make myself go back and try again, and this time I think about the Match Girl. In fact, after a couple of minutes I get my bag and pull out the folder with her mother’s story in it. I take out the old pages and hold them close.

  Little Klara. Her story haunted me when I was little. My mom read it to me by mistake, I think—we found the collection of fairy tales at a yard sale, and she bought it for me because I loved the full-page color illustrations. I remember that when she got close to the end, she kind of stopped and said, “Oh. This isn’t a very happy story. Let’s try the next one.” But I was already hooked—the Match Girl was so young, like me, and so obedient (not like me) and so cold—and I made her finish it. And then, of course, I had nightmares for days afterward. The next year I learned to read, and I read that story over and over, crying over her sad fate. I know, I know, she was all happy in heaven, but I only thought about her blue, stiff body and her brute of a father.

  And now it turns out that Klara is my relative. And her real story is even sadder than the book, so sad my heart breaks for the little girl and young mother pulled apart against their will.

  And then I’m there—oh my god, I’m there, right on the street Jack described, and it’s just like he said—the sooty buildings, the mist, the damp cobblestones. Jack said he felt strangely calm when he first went there, but I don’t. I’m freaking out, because, I realize, a part of me never actually believed in this place. I’m all racy with adrenaline, my heart hammering so fast they might need to call an ambulance for me next.

  She’s standing there, just like in the story, so frail and wispy-looking, her clothes worn thin and frayed. I walk up to her, willing my legs to move forward, trying to order them to stop shaking, and she trains her big blue eyes on me, and I can actually feel the hairs on the back of my neck—which I didn’t even realize I had—stand up. The spiders are crawling again, up and down my spine, as we size each other up.

  She looks like me, I think, and that’s what sets the spide
rs off. It’s the eyes, I guess, and the shape of her face—she looks like my half-starved Victorian little sister.

  I expect her to ask me to buy some matches, but she doesn’t. Instead, her eyes narrow and her pinched little face tightens up even smaller.

  “What are you doing here?” is what she says, and not politely either.

  What am I supposed to do? Beat her up? She’s dead already (and oh boy, does that send the spiders racing). I doubt I could even hurt her. Threaten her? With what? Grab Jack and run? Where would we go?

  I can’t think what to say, so I’m just standing there like an idiot, staring at her, and I think again about the shitty little life she had, cut off so soon, and now here she is, stuck in some ghastly movie-set world all by herself, and I just feel sorry for her. It’s really weird, how I can feel frantic for Jack and sorry for Klara all at the same time. And I think maybe my only chance, however faint, is to try to befriend her.

  I say the first thing that comes into my head.

  “Hello, Klara. I’ve wanted to help you ever since I was a little girl.” And it’s true. I did used to wish I could help her—bring her inside, warm her up and feed her, make her my little sister. I remember that now.

  She looks at me like I’m crazy, shakes her head and says in her thin little voice, “No. You’re just saying that to get to Jack.”

  Smart cookie.

  “It’s true that I’d like to see Jack,” I say carefully. “But it’s also true that your story made me really sad when I was young. I’m not lying about that.”

  Her big blue eyes probe me, but she doesn’t say anything, so I venture on.

  “Is Jack here, Klara?”

  “Yes, he’s back there.” She motions vaguely toward a stained brick building with an arched doorway. “He’ll be dead soon, I expect.” She lights up in a smile that is pretty much the scariest thing I ever saw. “Then we can be together for real.”

  Oh no. Oh, Jack, hang on. Little Klara is crazy, and I’m so far out of my league it’s not funny.

  “Please, Klara” is the most I can manage, and she turns on me.

  “Why do you keep calling me that?” Her gaze intent, almost ferocious.

  I take a step backward without meaning to, as if she might start shooting laser beams out of her dead eyes.

  “Isn’t that your name? And your mother was Sigrid.”

  Oh, that gets her attention. She’s like a feral cat on high alert.

  “We’re related, you know. I’m Lucy. Klara, Lucy—we both have a name that means ‘light.’” Am I babbling? I make myself stop and watch her reaction.

  “Klara.” She tries it on, softly. “Klara.”

  “Don’t you know your name?” I ask.

  “I didn’t think I had one.” Then her eyes snap back to me. She’s not the vague, floaty creature I saw over the river. Not at all. She’s focused, and Christ, she sure seems alive. “How do you know anything about it? You weren’t even born then.”

  “I found your mother’s notebook. It tells her whole story—the real story.” In fact, I’m still clutching it against my chest—until this moment I hadn’t even noticed that it came with me. I hold it out to show her.

  “My mother abandoned me.” Her little reedy voice hard and scornful, covering up the hurt. Oh, I know that voice. “I don’t care anything about her.”

  “Oh, Klara, is that what he told you? It’s not true. She loved you.”

  Her shoulders hunch up, so scrawny but doing their best to protect her. “No. If she loved me, she wouldn’t have left me.”

  “She didn’t. She tried to take you with her. She was going to America, to start a new life with you and your real father. He loved you too. He loved both of you.” Her eyes are trained on me now, big and blue and dangerous. I realize that if she decides I’m lying about something so important, about the biggest pain of her painful life, she’ll kill me along with Jack. The spiders are everywhere, the effort not to panic making me shake all over. I force myself to meet those spooky eyes. “She was tricked, Klara. Your grandmother came to the docks to help her, but then she ran off with you as Sigrid was boarding. Your mother couldn’t find you, and she couldn’t go back. She was heartbroken over it. And then your grandmother died, so you were sent back to your…to Henricksen.”

  “Is that what she wrote—in there?” She gestures to the notebook but makes no move to take it.

  I nod. “Everything that happened is in here.”

  Klara’s face closes down, and she shakes her head. “And I’m to believe someone like her could read and write?” Her voice is scornful, but I can see the emotional struggle playing out on her features, and I know—at least, I hope I know, because if I’m reading her wrong things could go very bad very quickly—that she wants to believe me. Wants it desperately. She may have grabbed on to Jack as a kind of consolation prize, but what she yearned for through her whole short life was her mother.

  “She didn’t write this herself,” I explain. “She got someone to write it down for her.” Daughter-in-law, I almost said, and realized just in time that Klara might not take kindly to the idea of other children.

  “Read it then.”

  “What?” A pathetic stall. I heard her, all right.

  “Read it. If this is the whole story that my mother wanted me to know, then read it to me.” She crosses her thin arms across her chest and glares at me.

  “There isn’t time, Klara,” I plead. “Jack is in a really a bad way. He needs help fast, and this is long—it took me two nights to read it.”

  Her chin lifts in defiant stubbornness, and, oh God, I recognize the gesture. I do it myself when I need to hang tough. “Read the important parts then. Read it, and then I’ll decide if what you’ve brought is worth giving up Jack.”

  There’s nothing for it but to read. Hang on, Jack, I think, and then I open the notebook and flip to the place where Sigrid is forced to marry. I scan the page, then begin: “Sit down, Sigrid, your father has news.” I read up to the scene with the priest, skip some pages and pick it up at “Klara is my only joy, but I worry after her as well.” I read the scene where Donal arrives, and then I jump to the docks where Klara is taken. One part of my mind is screaming at how long this is taking, but I know I have to give her enough to make it real. I don’t dare steal a glance at her until I come to a stop, where Sigrid boards the ship.

  Klara’s blue eyes are blurred with tears. Her face crumples and then so do her legs, until she’s huddled on the pavement, rocking herself back and forth. I have one last card to play.

  “Klara…she left a message for you.”

  “For me?” She seems shocked, as if she can’t conceive of anyone leaving anything for her. I nod. “Tell me.”

  I hesitate. “Let me see Jack first.”

  She jumps to her feet, eyes blazing. “TELL me!”

  I stand my ground. “I need to see Jack.”

  She flicks her hand impatiently, as if swatting away a fly. “Jack will be fine for another minute. You can see him after.”

  I don’t have time to play chicken. I turn to the last page and force myself to read slowly and clearly, “I wish to God I could let my daughter know that I loved her. I have prayed every day of my life that she was happy in my parents’ home, as I was, and that she found a loving husband, as I did. Losing her has been my constant, secret sorrow.”

  “She said that?”

  I just nod. Scared as I am, and frantic to see Jack, I can’t help but be moved by Klara’s response. Like this big poisoned well of hurt and hate is draining out of her. When she finally speaks, she is wistful, tentative, like she’s almost afraid to say it.

  “Do you think…do you think if I went with the other dead people, she’d be there? Would she want to see me?”

  Oh God. What do I know about ghosts and heaven and the afterlife? I’m tempted to paint it up as pretty as possible, to say anything to take her mind off Jack. But somehow I know it’s important not to lie—that she’ll know if I lie to
her.

  “I don’t know where people go after they die, Klara. But I do know that if your mother is there, she will want to wrap her arms around you and hold you close.”

  She smiles at this, the most wistful, sweet smile.

  “You can have the book, Klara. It’s yours, from your mother.” I hold it out, and this time she takes it. And I take my chance. “Can I see Jack now? You said I could.”

  She points without lifting her eyes from the book, like she’s not even thinking about Jack anymore. “Through that doorway.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  LUCY

  I yank open the heavy door and rush in. It’s so dark inside, I don’t see him at first. He’s curled in a ball in the corner. I yell at him, grab his hand, smack his face, but his eyelids don’t even flutter. How can I get him out of here if he won’t wake up?

  The door opens, and I jump up. I don’t want my back turned to Klara, sisterly fantasies or no. But she just sticks her head in the door.

  “You may as well have this. It’s of no use to me anymore.” She tosses something at me. It skitters a few inches across the floor like an ungainly insect. Her stick man of Jack. “I took the hair off.”

  And she’s gone. I don’t know what she means about the hair, but I take the doll. Should I break it? I decide it’s Jack’s, not mine, and I stick it inside his plaid shirt. I get kind of frantic about tying the ends of the shirt so it stays in, and so I don’t notice at first that Jack is stirring.

  “Lucy?” The words are slurred but there.

  “Jack! Oh, thank God, Jack!” Relief makes me weak and giddy, though I know we aren’t out of the woods yet. “Can you sit up?” I slide my arm under him and try to help while he props himself against the wall.