The Guardian's Playlist

by J Powell Ogden

  We lapsed into an uneasy silence after that, both of us checking the other out every now and again, until we reached the lightning tree clearing. It was still snowing, but it was a heavy wet snow, good snowball packing snow, and the temperature felt more like forty degrees than freezing. I started to get warm under all my layers and unzipped my parka, revealing the heavy cable knit wool sweater I had on underneath.

  “So there is a girl under there,” he teased. I glanced up at him and then looked away. The horrific knowledge I carried in my head was screaming so loudly to get out that I was shocked Michael couldn’t already hear it. But he was tense. He could sense something. He was already bristling.

  “What, Catherine…”

  A small rush of anxiety coursed through my body. The kind you feel before you’re about to confess something horrible you did. God, was I doing the right thing by making him face his past, or was I just torturing him?

  “What?” He moved to where he could see my face again. I forced my eyes to meet his. If I was going to shatter his day, the least I could do was look him in the eye when I did it. My jaw slid forward slightly as I braced for his reaction.

  “Michael…I know about Stephen,” I said quietly.

  He didn’t move for a second, not a muscle. Then he clenched his jaw and blew a harsh breath out through his nose. Then he vanished. Shit.

  “Screw you, Catherine!” His voice boomed off the trees louder than any human voice I’d ever heard, and I threw my hands up over my ears for protection. Usually I could home in on which direction his voice was coming from, but this time it came at me from all sides, as if he were everywhere at once.

  “What gives you the fu…freaking right to shove my nose back in shit like that? Huh? Just because you’re some stupid girl I used to know doesn’t give you the right to get inside my head and…and…”

  “Hey!” I shouted back as I spun around, trying to locate him. “For your information, I didn’t even want to come back after you chased me that first night through the woods!” Did he really think I’d chosen to help him all on my own? Just for fun? It was the nightmares that made me come back. It was time he knew that. “But…but…you were in these dreams I had and…” I couldn’t finish the thought. He’d just ridicule me again like he did with the song, “Hope Bleeds,” call me insane—

  “And what?” His voice coalesced into one location, and he reappeared abruptly in front of me. I jumped.

  “Don’t do that!” I shouted breathlessly.

  “What dreams?” he demanded to know. He was standing less than a foot in front of me, his hair soaked with sweat, his intense gray eyes compelling mine to meet his.

  I took a deep breath and spat it out. “I have the right to dig into your past, because in my dreams you begged me to help you.”

  He moved closer until his face was only inches above mine, and his expression had taken on a sense of urgency. “When? How?”

  “The night you died and the two nights after I saw you the first time in the woods. I saw your reflection in a dark pool of water…and…and in the last dream you were drowning! You asked me to come back! You said you needed me.”

  I didn’t think his eyes could get any more intense, but they did, and with his face so close to mine, I could almost feel them searing the uppermost layers of my skin. I plunged on.

  “In the third dream, something held me above the water and forced me to watch you drown in darkness. I woke up with a sore throat, a stiff neck and bloodshot eyes as if…as if it had really happened. As if the dream was real! That’s how I knew you were disappearing! That’s how I knew you were in trouble. That’s why I came back!”

  He backed away from me with a stunned look on his face, then turned his back to me and shook his head slowly. “It’s not possible,” he whispered.

  “Yeah! It is! Don’t you see? It’s like I’ve been telling you all along, something or someone wants me to help you and…” I bit my lip as my confidence abandoned me. Hot acid rolled up the back of my throat. “Helping you confront your past is the only thing I know to do, except from what I found out today, I don’t know if you’re strong enough.”

  He clenched and relaxed his fists a few times, then turned around to stare at me with eyes that were fiercely determined. Then he slowly crossed his arms in front of his chest, grabbed the sides of his black shirt, and in one fluid motion, pulled it up and over his head.

  “I’m strong enough, Catherine.”

  SIXTEEN

  CHERISH

  MY JAW DROPPED open as several things competed for my attention at once. Michael wasn’t tall, but he was perfectly proportioned. His sturdy muscled shoulders and upper arms flowed into powerfully developed chest muscles. Beneath them, faint indentations ran down the center and sides of his stomach, hinting at a solid six pack underneath. It was obvious he’d worked hard before he died to stay in shape, to stay strong. But the strength had come too late to prevent the cigarette burns that covered his chest. He must have been too little.

  At least fifteen pale round scars were etched permanently on his chest, and the anger that filled my throat burned hot. Red hot. I remembered my mouth and snapped it shut, and then I strode up to him, my eyes blazing.

  “How could they do that to you? The bastards!” I reached out my fingers without thinking, intent on tracing the evidence of the abuse the Johnsons had inflicted. If I could touch the scars, maybe I could do something to—

  “Don’t…” he whispered, and I looked up into his face to find his eyes closed and his jaw tight. He shook his head once, then relaxed his jaw, opened his eyes and searched for mine. There was pain there, but there was also something missing: the steel bars were gone.

  “Why are you willing to show me this now?” My voice was hushed and unsure. I didn’t understand. I hadn’t had to do anything at all. No begging. No pleading. He’d torn his lock apart and opened the cage that hid his pain-filled childhood memories all on his own. Now, he was inviting me in. I dropped my eyes down to his chest and allowed them to linger over each burn, each point of torture, and I wondered how he had endured it.

  “Because I know now that you’re not just being a freaking pest. I believe you when you say you were led here. I trust you now because…” His voice caught, and he cleared his throat, suddenly lost in his explanation. I lifted my eyes back up, and he glanced away into the snowy woods. “The night after I died I felt so damn lost…” Raw and uncensored emotion spilled into his voice as he went on. “I called out to you…I’m sorry. I’m so sorry! God! What have I dragged you into?” He buried his fingers in his wild, damp hair.

  I didn’t understand. “Michael, what are you—”

  “In my dreams, Catherine. I called out to you in my dreams. I had the same dreams as you on the same nights, the pool, the drowning, everything. And…” He tilted his head to the side, his narrowed eyes filling with awe. “You must have heard me.”

  I was suddenly cold. The wet chill stole its way right through the front of my sweater.

  “I didn’t…know you…dreamed,” I stammered.

  “Catherine,” he sighed. “Zip up that puffy thing you call a coat.”

  I rubbed my arms briskly with my palms. “What? Why?”

  “Because…you look cold…”

  My teeth chattered, and I zipped the parka back up. He broke eye contact and backed away from me a few steps toward the tree with the lightning burn, the tree that held our childhood ring. He caressed it with his hand then tightened his fingers into a fist and punched through it saying, “How is this possible? How can I be affecting you when you’re not even here? When you should be home safe in your own bed? How do you know things about me that I never told anyone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It beats the shit out of me, too.” He held his thumb and index finger up about a millimeter apart. “But I know I was this close to fading out for good when I had those dreams.” He whistled sharply through his teeth and then plowed on.

  “In
that first dream? When you…when you coughed up all that blood, I thought you were dying.”

  I hadn’t wanted to share that grizzly detail.

  “And that thing that was behind you?” he asked, his voice teetering on the edge of full-blown panic. “What the hell was that? Did I put that in your head?”

  My blood chilled. He’d seen everything. Was it all real, then? My scalp tingled, and I felt panic rising in my own chest that was hell bent on matching his. I forced it down. No. Michael was the one in danger here. He was the one who was lost.

  “And in the last dream? That was the worst. I called for you. I was desperate! But when you came, you were struggling. You were screaming my name! And someone was holding you above the water, like this…” He reached around behind his head and grabbed the back of his neck with his hand.

  My heart leapt into my throat. “Who?”

  He shook his head and sweat droplets flew off his hair. “I don’t know! I couldn’t see! The water was rippling too much!” He shook his head again in frustration and then leaned back against the tree and closed his eyes to block it all out.

  When I walked over to stand in front of him, he snapped them back open and asked anxiously, “And now you’re telling me you could actually feel the effects of that when you woke up? Like for real?”

  “Michael…”

  “Christ! With dreams like that, I can’t believe you came back at all.”

  But I’d had dreams like that before. The nightmares I’d had when I was little. They were nightmares so real they chipped away at my sanity even when I was tucked in between my parents in their bed. But I didn’t need to be afraid of them anymore. They were over. Isn’t that what the voice in the light promised me?

  I tried to shake myself back into the present, but I became lost, a small child trapped in her nightmare memories—black, shadowy figures peering with gold-fire eyes over the edge of the bed, beautiful faces tempting me to—

  “Catherine…” His voice and fragrance funneled inward and grabbed hold of me. A fog was lifting…

  “Wh-what?”

  “You kind of zoned out there for a minute,” he said quietly, pausing to study my face, and I tried to erase the blank look I knew I was giving him. I didn’t want to talk about those nightmares. They had nothing to do with what was going on now. They’d happened over ten years ago, before I’d even met Michael.

  With him leaning against the tree, his eyes were level with mine, and they were filled with worry. “Look what I’m doing to you.” His jaw twitched, and then he leaned in toward my face and whispered, “What if something happens to you?” His woodsy clean scent drifted into the space between us, and without the bars, his oceanic eyes were bottomless. My heart beat faster, and I felt as if I were falling…

  Michael pulled his face back abruptly, and I cleared my throat, unzipped my coat and let it drip off my shoulders. “Um…h-how can you be so sure it’s you sending me the dreams?”

  “Who else would it be?”

  I looked up pointedly, and there was the derisive laughter I expected every time I mentioned God. He shook his head back and forth patronizingly. I guess I knew that wasn’t going to fly.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I insisted.

  “How do you know?”

  “The dreams led me back to you, didn’t they?”

  He smiled grimly. “Maybe that’s all part of my evil plan,” he mumbled only half-jokingly. “Maybe we’ve been focusing on the wrong reason I’m still here. Hell, I don’t have any idea what I’m capable of. I’m a freaking…freak of nature! Maybe I really am like, some nasty demon intent on, you know…” He pointed at me and then slashed his index finger half-heartedly across his throat.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said.

  “Maybe you should leave now while you still can and never come back,” he suggested morosely.

  “Yeah, sure. And have you haunt me in my dreams for the rest of my life?”

  “God!” He threw his hands up in the air and cried, “Don’t say that! What if I actually did that?” He was starting to lose it again. His form was fading.

  “Michael…” I soothed. “You should know by now I could never leave you here alone. Never.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Seriously, I’m way too much of the stalker type.”

  He looked down at his feet and bounced his back against the tree, but his outline stabilized. Then he looked back up at me through his lashes, still visibly shaken.

  “Um, Catherine…it’s not just the dreams. There’s something else you knew that no one, and I mean no one, else knows.”

  My scalp prickled. “What do you mean?”

  He sighed and waved over at the mossy fallen log in the small clearing. “You’d better sit down. This is going to take a while,” he said. “I want to start at the beginning. I want you to know everything. You need to know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  I raised my eyebrows, but he clamped his mouth shut and shooed me away again, so I turned and scooped the heavy snow off the log and sat down. Michael joined me, sitting lightly on top of the snow’s surface across from me, still holding his black T-shirt twisted up in his hands. The temperature had dropped a little and the heavy snow flakes became gentle flurries that flew sleepily through his lithe, muscular body with no resistance at all. My eyes kept trying to follow the trajectory of each flake and predict where it would fly out on the other side of him. It was distracting, and I had to concentrate to stay focused on his face.

  As he settled himself down, he absently stroked his tattoo. The small sword yielded under the rhythmic pressure of his thumb, undulating up and down like a sine wave. Then he ran his fingers through his hair and wrapped his arms around his splayed knees. He began with a question.

  “Did you know my dad was a police officer?”

  I nodded. “There was a picture of you looking up at him in his uniform at your wake.”

  “That was the only picture I had of him. I thought that was so cool, you know? That he was a policeman.” He paused, and his jaw tensed briefly. “That winter of second grade? My dad was shot and killed during a police raid. I don’t know the specifics. No one would ever tell me. I don’t even know if they caught the asshole that did it.”

  “That’s awful” I cried. “You still don’t know what happened?” He shook his head and held up his hand to ward off more questions. Then he grasped his knees again and rocked restlessly back and forth.

  “So my mom? She got sick after that, or at least I thought she was sick. She was in bed a lot and was taking all these pills and injecting herself.” He moved his thumb down to his forearm, lightly trailing it up and down from the inside of his elbow to his wrist. My stomach dropped. My mom told me drugs were involved, but…

  “Heroin?”

  “Yeah.” He looked away and blew out softly through his mouth. “So she was mainlining almost daily, only I didn’t know what that was back then. I started doing for myself, you know? Trying to catch the school bus on time, eating a lot of peanut butter sandwiches, making her peanut butter sandwiches, but she never ate them. I’d find them when I got home from school all crusty and dried out on the plate I’d left next to her bed. Sometimes she’d be up by then, almost normal, and ask about my day. Other times she’d just be gone.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” My stomach churned to think of him so small and alone.

  “Who, Catherine? What was I going to tell them? I was completely clueless.” He shook his head in frustration. “People knew, though. The neighbors started pulling their curtains closed when my mom’s new ‘friends’ came and went. Sister Patricia came by once. And someone must have called Social Services because they showed up a few times. But my mom was good at hiding her habit. Better than others I’ve seen. Looking back, I think maybe nobody wanted to hassle the widow of an officer killed in the line of duty.”

  I started to get angry again. “If someone knew, why didn’t they do something? They ju
st looked the other way? Passed you off like a freaking baton?”

  “Pretty much,” he said and shrugged, but his eyes held mine for a moment. “By May my mom was really hitting it hard. One afternoon I came home from school, and I couldn’t wake her up. She was still breathing, but…” He dropped his eyes and focused on his fingers. “One of the neighbors came over to drop something off. She’s the one who called the squad. She drove me to the hospital and waited with me until Social Services got there and then she left.” He paused and looked up from his fingers. “She told me everything would be alright.”

  “And she never bothered to make sure?”

  He looked away.

  My pulse pounded. “Who was it? They should know what—”

  “It was a long time ago. I can’t really remember. Look, it’s not the point of—”

  “But Michael, you said you’d tell me—”

  “I’m dead. Got it? Game over. It doesn’t matter anymore. Drop it.” His eyes were darkening, deepening, and his voice was rising. The sound of it wound around me eerily for several long seconds after he closed his mouth, and the hair on my arms stood up. I glanced away, unnerved. “Just…listen,” he said grimly. “You need to hear this next part, because it concerns you.”

  I looked back sharply, my mind stumbling ahead, trying to figure out what he could be talking about. He took a deep breath and picked up the pieces of his story.

  “Late that night the lady from Social Services took me to this old house. The Johnsons’ house. It must have been over a hundred years old. The Johnsons were all like, ‘Oh, isn’t he so cute!’ and ‘You’re gonna like it here!’ Even at the age of eight I’m thinking, ‘Right. Sure.’ The first time I saw Mr. Johnson? I thought of the Joker, you know? Like from Batman? He smiled at me, but there was something like totally not right about his eyes. They didn’t smile with the rest of him.”

  His jaw twitched, and he shook his head as if he was trying to shake a memory loose.