My words are like smoke in her face. "You don't have to do anything." The disappointment drips from her tongue.
I frown. "I didn't mean it like that. I'm just- I can barely take care of myself."
"I'm good with..."
"Oh no!" I launch to my feet. "I have to go!"
Her eyes round. "Where?"
I turn and sprint toward my car. "If you're coming, you need to run!"
2
Reaching street level, I am relieved to see that it’s clear. The loopers are still focused on the motorcycle and pay no attention as I pass. I don’t wait to pick up speed; there is no time for caution. I’ll have to race the entire route and still might not make it home in time.
"Where are we going?" asks the strawberry-haired girl, sitting in the passenger seat with her helmet in her lap, and her gloved hands gripping it. Her biker jacket is open now, and I can see that she is wearing a bright orange shirt that is tucked into black and grey motorbike pants that go down into fashionable hard leather boots with lots of straps and no heels.
"Home," I say, bluntly. Not wanting to reveal too much and hoping she won't pry.
"Why the rush?" she pries.
Would she understand? Could I make her? I grip the steering wheel and stare at the road ahead. My new companion is quick to take offense to my silence.
"O-kay," she says, elongating the A sound. "You don't want to tell me. I get it."
Great, this is all I need. Drama.
I give her an irritated glance, and then look back out the windshield, continuing my numbing stare. "Have you always been this way?"
"What way?"
"Temperamental."
"I'm not temperamental." She huffs.
I shake my head and scrunch my face. This causes her to snuff out her nose and settle into her seat.
"Do you have a name?" I ask.
Her voice is weak. I can tell she doesn't want to answer, but she does, probably out of fear that I will consider her too much of a hassle and ditch her on the side of the road if she doesn’t. "Ashlyn," she says, "Ashlyn Scott."
"Why were the loopers chasing you?"
"The what?"
"The dead," I clarify.
She nods with understanding.
"I've never seen them chase a motorcycle before."
"I figured the best way to get around would be on a bike. I didn't know it was one of theirs. He came running out of a store screaming, and I panicked."
"And you picked up the rest trying to get away from the first?"
"Sort of." I can tell by her change in demeanor she is embarrassed.
"What did you do, run someone over?"
She swallows. "I hit a woman with a baby. Not a live one," she blurts defensively. "They were dead. I'm sure of it. The baby didn't cry or nothing when it hit the ground."
All I can do is wince.
"She's the one who got them all going. Everyone started going ballistic."
"And what made you decide going up into a parking garage would save you from them?"
"I was riding for my life, I didn't know what it was till it was too late." She grips the helmet in her lap, and her voice cracks. "I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I just keep running. I just keep hiding."
"Me too, Ashlyn," I say softly. She seems grateful for the tenderness of my response, and we drive in silence for a while.
"What's your name," she says at last.
"Ben Carter."
"Are you alone too, Ben Carter?"
"It's just me and my wife Kate."
"Is that where you're going? To her?"
"Yes."
This is enough for her. She looks out the window, and we drive in silence again. Not another word is spoken until we get to the gate of the cul-de-sac where I live.
"You live here?" she says, wide eyed.
"Yes," I say, turning in. My eyes scan the yards for any strange activity—well—stranger than usual. There is always something weird to see.
"You were a rich guy before all this went down." Her eyes brush over the expensive houses. Half the lawns are overgrown now. The loopers still mow them, but, without gas, the mowers don't do a very good job.
"I made a decent living."
I check my watch. I have five minutes. There were no surprises on the trip home, so I made up the lost time. "See that house?" I say, pointing to a two story on the right.
"Which one? They all look the same."
"The one with the green garage door."
"Yeah."
"That’s my safe house. The key’s under the mat.
She turns. "Aren't you coming?"
"I have to grab some supplies."
"What about your wife?"
"She's not in there. You're safe."
"Where is she?"
"Up the road."
"Then I'll go with you," she says, settling into her seat.
"No. You stay here."
"But I want..."
"You stay here," I say sharply. "This isn't a debate."
She studies the stern face I'm giving her and a look of understanding washes over her features. "I get it. You have to do this alone."
My muscles loosen. "Yes."
"Okay." She lifts her chin. "I'll wait here."
"There's food in the cellar. I won't be long."
She climbs out and holds the door open. "Promise me you're coming back."
"Of course I’m coming back."
After an excruciating pause she closes the door, and I continue on up the road around the long gentle bend. My house is the last one on the left before the dead end loop. I slow down and pull into the driveway.
There’s no sign of danger, so I get out and take my place on the lawn. Harold, my neighbor across the street, is clipping his shrubs—again. He gives me a friendly wave, but I don't bother to wave back. If I wave, it will trigger another automated series of movements that will bring him down to the edge of the driveway to talk with me. I used to look forward to those conversations. He would always tell me some new gardening secret he had discovered, and I would tell him what product my company was working on that would change the future. I liked him. Who he used to be. The thing he is now grieves me to look at, and I have enough grief to last a lifetime.
A movement pulls my attention back. It is my wife. She’s running toward me around the bushes on the side of our house. There is anguish in her countenance, an anguish that still makes my gut tighten. She comes to a full stop in front of me, chest heaving to take in a breath. Her lips move, but only a husky noise comes out. My mind inserts the words. "She's gone, Ben. She's gone." My heart hurts as though the wound upon it is fresh. She falls to the ground with outstretched arms and groans another sentence. Against my will, my brain translates. "It pushed her and she fell."
I reach out to hold her, but she pushes my arms away as she has done some forty times before. But it doesn't matter. I do now what I did on that horrible day. I didn't care that she was sick. I didn't care if the poison inside her tears might leak into my skin. I couldn't let her suffer the loss of our daughter alone.
I fall to my knees and clutch her squirming body. She could easily resist me with the strength she now has, but she doesn't. Her movements are a pantomime of submission. She collapses within my arms, sobbing deeply.
And for the first time—I cry too.
3
There was never any time to grieve over the death of my daughter. The day Katherine came running up the lawn, so much had happened. I was in shock. It was like a roller coaster back then. One thing after another. People I'd known my whole life—people I loved—were dropping dead in the streets, or right in front of me. It was too much. I was on nonstop adrenal overload.
Since that day, all of my energy has been spent on Kate, learning her loop and keeping her safe. My daughter’s death was just another detail I had to remember. But today, it feels different. I have played this scene out so many times, I do it now without thinking, so my mind has time to wander to memories I
have not allowed myself to visit. Memories of my precious little girl.
They flood forth without concern for what harm they will do, and I allow them. Each flash is like a dagger in my gut, but I want to remember now. I need to remember, no matter how much it hurts. I can't live in this dead skin any longer. If I do, I will be no better than them. As I kneel, pressing my wife's wavy blonde head to my chest, soaking her cold forehead with my tears, I feel almost alive.
But it doesn't last long. She pushes me onto my heels and crawls backward. Her finger points at my shirt, and her jaw moves to perfectly form words that don't come out. I don’t know why they do this. She obviously remembers the words that were spoken, but her brain can't make her vocal cords produce the sound. All that comes out is a slight hiss.
I don't remember what she said that day, but I know what she wants me to do. Her tears were on my shirt, and she was afraid for me. I'm safe now, though. The only tears on my shirt are my own. The dead don't cry.
She points again and a guttural growl begins to hum in her throat, but I don't bother to take it off; I know what happens next. She throws herself to the ground in reaction to an explosion, but there is none. What remains of the car that exploded lays across the street in Harold's yard, charred and shredded. She scrambles to her feet and bolts for the front door. I follow. There are a few things left for me to do. She pushes through and falls into a quick crawl toward the living room. I bolt the door, get down, and crawl with her. It agitates her if I don't.
We sit with our backs to the couch for a long time, until it seems like her body shuts down. She is probably waiting for me to do something, but I haven't figured out what it is. I've found that doing nothing isn't as bad as doing the wrong thing—well, not so much the wrong thing as simply impeding whatever automated process is going on. The greater the importance of the process, the greater the anger. Like Ashlyn and the man who owned the motorcycle. He probably used that motorcycle to get from one section of his loop to the next. By taking the motorcycle, she kept him from completing his loop from home, to the store, to work. It was like she took a piece of his life away.
When this kind of thing happens, the looper's brain must then do something it does not like to do. It must make a decision—and the looper will do a lot of damage before its brain can come to a conclusion. When it does, the results are sometimes comical. I once saw a man sitting in a parking spot on the side of the road. Days later, he was still in the same spot. It finally dawned on me what he was doing. He must have gone to get in his car and found it missing. After what was probably a day long rampage, his brain came to the conclusion that he would sit and wait for the car to return. He’s probably sitting there still.
Most of the time, when a looper’s loop is broken, they will choose to either go to the place that is most familiar, or go to the place that holds the most connection, and give up on trying to get back and forth.
I feel Kate squirm next to me. Her mouth begins to form words again. This is where she makes her daily confession to me in airy whispers. She is sorry she hadn't been braver. She is sorry she hadn't been more vigilant to protect our daughter. As I study the anguish on her face, I can't help but wonder again about the nature of emotion. Her brain reproduces all of the outward signs of guilt and remorse, but is she feeling it? Is she re-living the pain of that day, or is her brain merely sending signals to tighten the muscles?
I snap my fingers in front of her face. Her eyes lock onto them. Jaw slightly slack. Emotion gone. She has no automated response for what I've done. She remains transfixed until I drop my hand. The process she was in isn’t important and can be interrupted, much in the way Harold is able to pause from clipping his hedges. The next one, however, is important and must be done right or it will break her loop. I found this out the hard way.
"I'll get you something to eat," I say, mechanically.
She looks at me, emotion has returned to her face because my words let her move on from the death of our daughter into a different space. It is the section of her day I call ‘home.’ It can be any variety of smaller motor memories from doing laundry to decorating a Christmas tree. When Kate is in home mode, she acts out any scene from our past in perfect detail with no consideration for sequence or time of year, scenes that hold a significance for her. If she is agitated, she does chores. The familiarity of repetitive tasks have a calming effect on her.
I stand and go into the kitchen. A can sits in the strainer. It is empty. Clean. And only slightly rusted. I plunk a spoon in it and bring it back to my wife. She receives it graciously and begins to eat the air inside, in slow stoic silence. I don't understand how it works. All I know is that the can is important. She can adapt to whatever is inside, but it has to be a can. Otherwise, she growls. Or worse.
I used to put food in the can, but supplies are getting harder to acquire safely. Loopers don't like it when you go into their homes uninvited. And store owners—even dead ones—don't tolerate shoplifting. For a short period, I was able to pretend like I was buying the food, until the cash registers stopped working. Man. There is nothing worse than a looper trying to get into a dead cash register.
Kate sets her hands in her lap and looks at me. She is so beautiful. She has always been beautiful. If she had a flaw, it was the mole on her left cheek. But that is gone now. It is a constant reminder that she has been changed. I reach out and cradle her jaw in my hands and rub my warm thumb on the spot where the mole used to be.
My touch triggers another stored response. Her eyes light and her face warms, even though it is cold against my palms. I’m not sure which scene from our life together is playing out, but it produces a look that reminds me of the way she looked at me on our wedding day. My heart aches as our vows come back into my mind.
For richer. For poorer. In sickness and in health. Till death parts us.
The corners of my mouth tighten. "No," I say. "Not even death."
She stops for a moment, as if she heard what I said, then continues the mental process I started. The series of motions pulls her head free from my hands, and her mouth begins to sound out words again, but I don’t know what they are.
I come in close and whisper in her ear. "I know you’re in there."
She pauses again. Her eyes grow as cold as her skin.
"I will never give up on you, Kate. Do you hear me? I will find a cure for this. You just have to hold on."
Her breath begins a shallow flutter, like the sound of a distant helicopter, and for the briefest of moments I wonder if she is responding to my statement. Is she clawing her way back to life? Can she hear me?
No. It won’t be that easy, I remind myself. There is no way to return from where she is without neutralizing the poison in her brain. There are some who believe there is no hope, that, like her body, her brain is dead. I reject that theory. She may not have a pulse, but she is still alive. There are memories in there. If she can access memories, her brain can’t be entirely dead.
She looks at the television and climbs to her feet. This signals that she is about to shift into another process, one that is part of her loop and cannot be interrupted. She lifts her hands and swings them in front of her as she slowly walks toward the corner of the room. I want to help her find what she is looking for, but it is better to stay out of her way. This scene is complicated; she must act it out precisely.
Her hand slaps the armoire and slides down the doors to find the handle of the top drawer. Her head remains cocked to the side, eyes staring blindly. Objects clunk around inside the drawer, and her lips start frantically sounding out words.
"It’s to the left," I say. Whether or not I speak is irrelevant. When she is in one of these scenes—the ones that are required for her loop—she is unresponsive. She yanks a flashlight from the drawer, hunches over to press down on the switch, and lifts it to scan the room. It doesn't matter that there is light in the room, or that the flashlight is broken. Her body is simply playing out the sequence.
If I could remember where
I was standing or what I was doing, I could join her, because I was there that day. But loop scenes do not allow for adaptability, like the random processes do.
I walk to the center of the living room and wait for the one part I do remember, the part that I must see every day. It is what keeps me going. If it were not for this, I would have ended it. I swear I would have.
After several minutes she returns to the living room. For her it’s as if I have been with her the whole time. The flashlight is now gone. In her mind, I now have it. In reality it is on the dining room floor. I heard the thump when she handed it to thin air.
Her hand is in front of her as she walks slowly. It drops down and her fingers scrunch into a half fist. Though we are not touching yet, I can almost feel how she clutched my shirt in the dark that day. We were so terrified. I watch the hand as it swings around and bumps into my side. We are now in sync. I have not moved, but to her I have come to a stop and turned around.
Her other hand comes up onto my chest, but she does not draw in close for fear that she may contaminate me. There is a mix of emotions in her eyes. Fear, uncertainty, sorrow. But a stronger emotion forces these away. Her full red lips tighten as her light brows lift. In this moment, I feel I could drown in her crystal green eyes and never find air. It isn't just her beauty that so enraptures me. It is her vulnerability. No matter how deep, no matter how private, she always had a way of laying the innermost parts of her heart naked before me.
Her lips move and I sound out the words in my head. "Tell me this is going to be all right."
"We're going to find a cure," I say.
"What if I don't want to be cured? What if I don't want to live with this pain?"
"We will find beauty in these ashes," I say.
Her eyes smile and her lips form the words, "How do you do that?" But the next sentence is too quick for me to read. I wait patiently for her to slow down. She always does. Her chin tightens, but no tears trickle from her dry eyes. "It hurts so bad, Ben."
"We will get through this. Just promise me you'll fight."
Lies (The David Chance Series Book 3) Page 23
