by Kaleb Nation
“I think we do,” I said in agreement. Callista’s head bowed forward slightly—there we went again, two against one. Thad cleared his throat.
“I don’t know my parents,” he began. “Not even since I was a kid. They’re either dead or too high right now to realize I’m alive. I live—I lived—with my uncle in Washington. He won’t go looking for me, so I’m not worried about going back.”
He uncrossed his legs, tilting them in front of himself and draping his arms over his knees. “So if we get shot at again and I can’t make it, and I die, not many people are going to really care all that much. Just so you know.”
It was such a despondent thing to say. It was almost like Thad was outing himself as expendable, telling us to not worry about police being sent to search for him. He didn’t say it in a self-deprecating way: just a fact.
The TV babbled on. No one volunteered to continue. I swallowed nervously.
“I live in the Valley,” I said. “It’s this town called Arleta. I have my mom and my sister…that’s mostly it. If I can keep them safe long enough to figure this out and take them someplace else, I’ll be happy.”
And if not? I didn’t want to think about it. There wasn’t another option. I would go home, and I would get my life back in order. I could fix this. I could make all of this better and make it all go away. I’d never faced a problem I couldn’t solve, so I could solve this, right?
There was only one person left to talk. At first she didn’t, and so much silence went on after me that I assumed she wasn’t going to speak at all.
“My family is dead,” Callista’s voice cracked.
It took great effort for her to get the words out. She wiped her eyes swiftly.
“That’s all,” she said. “They’re gone. I watched them being killed. It was nighttime. I watched that Guardian with the white eyebrows—Wyck—he shot them all. He shot my mom first, then my dad, then both my brothers. They were just crying.”
A quick breath tumbled out of her.
“They weren’t doing anything but crying,” she insisted. “And he just shot them in the back of their heads. And then they put the bag over me, and Wyck took me away, and when I woke up I was in the white room.”
Callista curled over into a sitting ball. The white room. The way she said it made me feel cold inside, bumps rolling across my skin at the desperation and terror that had infused her thought of that place. It hit me how long she’d been kept a prisoner, not even allowed a few moments to recover from the death of her family before she was thrust into whatever living nightmare I could see scrolling in memory through her eyes.
“So even when this is over, I don’t have anywhere to go,” she finished.
She stood up suddenly. Neither Thad nor I acknowledged her as she left, staring at the floor, the weight in the room pushing against our chests. The door opened and closed behind her, and then it was only Thad and I. Again.
The TV babbled on.
* * *
When I regained power over myself, I stood, picked up my plate and the cans of food, and left Thad. I crossed the hall, toes sinking in to the gentle carpet. Callista had taken the blue bedroom, the door now closed, so I went into the green one. The door clicked solidly behind me.
I shone the flashlight into the dark corners, checking the closet just because I knew I’d feel safer if I made sure nothing was in there. The shelves and racks were empty, no clothes or even a single coat hanger.
The bed’s mattress was so thick that it nearly went up to my hips, and the sheets were so tightly pressed that I had some difficulty getting them pulled back. I pushed most of the pillows off onto the floor and chose the flattest of them, which was still overstuffed. I flicked the flashlight off.
In the sudden darkness, I could have easily been disoriented into thinking I was in my room, until my eyes adjusted and my surroundings proved otherwise. As I lay facing the ceiling—which had no fan on it, and made me miss my room even more—I realized that I’d already been away from home for far longer than I’d ever disappeared before. My mom was surely at the police station already, calling my friends, calling the school. She wouldn’t find any information on my clients because I kept those locked away. But she’d worry. That was the worst part. There was nothing I could do about it either.
It felt like ages ago when I’d first found the website with Spud, first heard the word Guardian from Father Lonnie, first seen his body dangling from the church. I’d only uncovered a scratch of what the Guardians did, and already I’d seen earthquakes that killed hundreds, people stuck through steeples, cars and planes blown up. What else might they be responsible for?
Sleep drifted over me slowly, but as I was exhausted I couldn’t resist its pull. I floated away into the black, and soon I was gone.
Again, I didn’t dream. It seemed as if no time even passed between the closing of my eyes and their opening again. I was still in the dark, thinking a second that I was home and then finding to my disappointment that I wasn’t. Would I ever wake up again and not think that everything previous had been a bad dream? I sighed, rolling over.
There was a dim light shining under my door, unnaturally turquoise.
It didn’t move like someone walking by with a flashlight. I didn’t know if I should be worried—it hadn’t been there when I’d gone to sleep. And now I wasn’t going to fall back asleep because I’d already spent too much time concentrating on it. So reluctantly, but with some curiosity, I slid my feet to the floor and walked to the door. I peered around the corner of my doorframe.
Callista was sitting on the carpet at the end with her back against the wall. Her face was illuminated by a multitude of softly glowing nightlights, one in each plug going across the floor—six in all on both sides. She was absently flicking a cigarette lighter in her hand, letting the flame pop for a second before killing it and starting over. She didn’t appear startled by my emergence, turning her head up at me.
“It’s past your bedtime,” she said in a low voice. No malice though.
“You’re the one who’s sitting out in the hall,” I replied. When she didn’t seem suspicious, I stepped outside. She leaned her head into the corner. Flick. Flick. The tiny flame kept flashing and disappearing.
“Where’s Thad?” I asked.
“Sleeping,” she replied. Flick.
“You’re not tired?”
Callista shrugged passively. “I don’t sleep easily.”
I glanced across the curious line of nightlights, their bulbs casting little glowing circles on the floor and tall ovals on the walls. I had no idea where she’d gotten them from, unless she’d somehow collected them from the bathrooms. I didn’t feel right just leaving her there, so I walked across and slid to sit a few feet from her against the opposite wall.
“You can’t sleep?” I questioned, rubbing my eyes. “It’s got to be super late by now.”
“I don’t like nighttime that much,” she said. “Insomnia.”
“You can take something for that,” I offered, trying to be as considerate as I could, to make up for earlier. “We can get you some sleep aid tomorrow.” Or Valerian Root, as my mom would have corrected.
“That won’t help,” Callista replied. At first I thought she’d stop there, then she shrugged.
“Actually,” she said, “I’m tired, but…well, it’s hard to sleep in the dark now.”
Immediately, her face told me that she regretted saying that, though it’d tumbled out in her exhaustion before she could catch it. I figured out the scene at once. From her position pressed in the corner of the room, to the lights that protected her in a soft circle, it hit me all at once that Callista was afraid of the dark.
That came as a shock. Callista was the most brutal of us all—she’d taken down a plane! But the anxiety on her face was real.
I slid down to sit until my feet touched the opposite wall, at a loss for what to say. In the low lights, though, I watched her relax slightly, now that I didn’t look to be leaving anytim
e soon. Her finger stopped and she set the lighter next to her. Thoughts of our fight were still swirling in the air.
“I’m sorry for earlier,” I said. It was hard to say the words but I managed to wrestle them out.
She didn’t reply. So we both sat in the empty quiet, listening to the sound of the air conditioner. I let my head rest behind me.
“Wyck came at night,” Callista broke the silence. I opened my eyes. She was staring straight ahead.
“If I’m in the dark, I start to see their faces,” she continued. “My mind makes shapes with the dark and they just slip out. Sometimes it’s my family, sometimes it’s him. That’s why I don’t like the dark.”
I said nothing. Inside, I felt arrows going through my chest.
“He didn’t have to kill them,” Callista said. “But he did it anyway, to make a point to me. He wanted to break me down so I wouldn’t fight them later.”
Her gaze remained distant. When I dared to venture a look at her eyes, it was almost like I could see a movie of the horrible night she’d gone through playing behind their pupils.
Guilt crept upon me. I still had my family. How could I have dared to think that I’d given up anything when I still had something to go back to?
I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, but I couldn’t just leave her sitting there like that so I turned around, switching to the other side of the hall to sit closer to her, a safe five inches between us. At first she looked at me as if wondering what I was doing, but when I settled down she relaxed again. She didn’t push me away at least; that was good.
But again, more quiet. More wordless novels being spoken between us by our breathing. The silence composed a sonata of loss.
I absently studied her resting hands, the skin uninterrupted by lines or cuts that should have marked where the scales would emerge. Just an eternity of skin that continued up her arm and to her neck and disappeared where her hair began.
She looked uncomfortably tense. Suddenly I had an urge to reach across the four or five inches between us, to touch her shoulders and try to ease the anxiety out of her with my thumbs. Seeing her bent over made me ache. And it just looked like she needed that.
But I wasn’t brave enough, and I figured she’d recoil and ask why I was being ridiculous if I tried. Thad maybe could have, if he was there. They’d been stuck together for days before I’d even arrived, and in our situation that was almost like years. He felt like her brother, and I still felt like an outsider.
I let the inches remain, and crossed my hands so they wouldn’t wander away against my will. I just wanted her to feel better.
“Do you want to know a secret?” I said abruptly. Callista gave a half grin, her head still resting and eyes closed. It was almost a whole grin, but she suppressed it; I didn’t mind because her attempts were telling.
“Alright,” she said, playing along.
“So, when all this started,” I said, scooting down on the wall so that my head was level with hers, “I was with one of my friends, and we found a newspaper article about you…dying.”
Of all things, to bring that article up. So I deflected quickly.
“It had your picture,” I said. “And when I pulled it out, the first thing from my friend’s mouth was something like, “That’s a shame, she was hot.”
Callista couldn’t hold in the hiss of laughter that escaped when I said that. It came out as a snort through her nose, and that ridiculous sound made me chuckle too.
“I mean,” I went on, “he’d just found out you were dead, and he was sad because he thought you were hot. That was the worst thing in the world to him.”
She couldn’t wipe the grin off her face, because even when she pulled one corner down it went up when she pictured the scene again. I felt a thrill just watching her struggle. Success…
She shook her head at me in a scolding way, finally opening her eyes to glare at me. “You’re ridiculous.”
“You thought it was funny,” I told her, and she didn’t argue. The way she rolled her eyes away grabbed my attention. I’d never actually been that close to them since she’d come out of my dream, so I found myself almost enthralled by their blue infinity. She caught me staring.
“There was something else too,” I said, trying to act nonchalant as I looked away.
“More about how hot I am?” she said, giving a slow and unimpressed blink.
“Do you not want to hear the story?” I asked with a faked sharpness. She snapped her mouth shut, lifting her eyebrows innocently.
“That’s better,” I said, pulling my knees up. “So, after I got the newspaper article, I actually sneaked it back home with me. Because I have a wall, see…”
How was I going to explain my Great Work? It was impossible to boil it down into a few words.
“Well, I take pictures,” I tried. “See, I can read emotions through people’s eyes.”
She looked at me strangely. I guess I’d forgotten to explain that part. I stumbled on my words again.
“It’s a long story,” I said. “But keep up with me. I can read people’s emotions and mental reactions through their eyes, especially in photographs: I call it the Glimpse. So I just take pictures of people all the time, and then I put their faces on my wall. And… and…”
You’re going downhill, Michael. You’re boring her. Pull up before you crash…
“Anyway,” I said, “so I had your picture. And on my wall there are different places for different emotions I’ve found Glimpses of, like love and anger and sadness and stuff. But I couldn’t figure out where you were supposed to go on my wall.”
“Did I not look happy enough for happy?” she said. I shook my head.
“It didn’t fit there, there was something stronger,” I said. “I had to pick the strongest one out of a million, and I couldn’t figure you out. But I think I just did.”
I held up a finger. “You belonged on the Love wall, up on the ceiling. I got confused because you weren’t exactly in love with a person; you were just in love with your life.”
I heard a long and deep breath go in and out of her, difficult but not painful… just lamenting. Remembering. I’d stepped onto dangerous ground, bringing up her old life. It could have been the right thing to say but I found it tough to gauge her thoughts. Maybe I’d dug too deep.
“That’s really sweet of you,” she said. Then her head bent over and fell onto my shoulder.
I froze into ice. The top of her head was now pressed into the side of my neck, the dark strands of her hair against my ear and flattened around my cheek. She had leaned over the four-or-five-inch ravine, her warm shoulder against the side of my arm.
Had she done it on purpose? Was she just using me as a prop? What was she doing? Why did she just do that?
She was bent against me, her arms still around her knees. I’d never gotten that close to her before. I’d never smelled her before.
Could she tell that I had turned into a statue? She had to hear my heartbeat because I could feel it pumping through my neck so close to where her ear was.
What’s wrong with you? What’s going on? Michael? Are you functioning? My brain was resetting its internal computer, trying in vain to compensate. I wanted everything to stop because I was too confused to figure out what was happening, but I didn’t want it to stop—no, don’t stop. Don’t move. I had to keep my shoulder as still as I possibly could so she wouldn’t leave.
She jumped, as if realizing what she’d done. Her head jerked back up as she sat straight.
“I—I’m sorry,” I said, even though I hadn’t done anything. Then I saw what was probably what I wanted to see the least at that moment: tears, falling out of Callista’s eyes. She wiped them away quickly but was unable to hide them in time.
“We can’t do this, Michael,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, eyes filled with guilt.
“I understand, you’re just…tired,” I said, trying to brush it off. I still didn’t know what’d happened.
“No,” she said
, shaking her head, wiping her eyes with her sleeve in a vain attempt to dry them. She looked wrecked. I shouldn’t have let that happen. I’d done something, and I didn’t know what… maybe I shouldn’t have even stepped out of my room at all.
Callista shook her head again as if she could flick out whatever painful thought was in it.
“I lied to you,” she said.
“When?” I asked.
“Earlier,” she replied, sniffing again, face full of even deeper remorse “I didn’t…I didn’t actually lie. But I didn’t say something when I should have. A long time ago.”
She cleared her throat. “I knew that we’d lived before and had other lives. I just didn’t say anything.”
All along? Had I missed so many clues that she’d put it together long before me? Confusion hit and a barrel of questions broke open in front of me.
“How?” I asked. She scratched the back of her head, ruffling her hair nervously before pulling it back behind her shoulders.
“I—I had different dreams than you,” she admitted.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” I felt lost. I couldn’t think of any reason why she’d have withheld that. It wasn’t like I’d have been angry with her. It just might have helped me to figure things out much faster.
She shook her head. “It’s not what you think, Michael. It was about us. You and me.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant and her voice refused to give me any indication. She gathered her courage and pressed on.
“I think I had more dreams than you,” she said. “Maybe Thad did as well; I haven’t asked. I didn’t just dream of finding you and then getting killed. I dreamed of other things.”
She nodded, voice going melancholy. “You and I and Thad, in some other life. In my dreams, I called you Daniel but I didn’t see him, I saw you, just like you are now.”
She waved her hand at me. I remembered how my dreams had also shown her and Thad as they were, not who they’d been in the other lives. I guessed it’d been a part of our connection—something that’d linked us in this real life.
