by TAYLOR ADAMS
Jay whispered something.
“What’d you say?”
“I said thank you.”
This gave Darby a little chill, and her stomach fluttered with emotions she couldn’t articulate. She wasn’t sure what to say to Jay, how to answer that — you’re welcome? All she knew was that if she were given the choice, she’d do it all over again. Every minute of tonight. All of the pain. Every sacrifice. Because if saving a seven-year-old from child predators isn’t worth dying for, what the hell is?
And now, bleeding out into the snow, watching the state-funded Wanapani visitor center burn and collapse into black skeleton, Darby collapsed too, into a deep and satisfying peace. She was so close now. So achingly close. She just had one last thing to do, quickly, before she lost consciousness: “Jay? One last favor. Reach into my right pocket, please. There should be a blue pen.”
A pause. “Okay.”
“Put it in my left hand.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, please. And then I need you to go back to that snowplow. Tell the driver to turn it around and drive you to a hospital right now. Tell him it’s an emergency, that you need steroids before you have a seizure—”
“Are you going to come with us?”
“No. I’m going to stay right here. I need to sleep.”
“Please. Come with us—”
“I can’t.” Darby’s tether had snapped and she was falling again, dropping through floors of darkness, sliding into the back of her own head, back in Provo now, back in her old childhood house with bad pipes and the popcorn ceiling, wrapped in her mother’s arms. The nightmare dispelling. Her mother’s warm voice in her ear: See? You’re fine, Darby. It was just a bad dream.
And it’s all over now—
“Please,” Jay whispered, far away. “Please, come with me—”
Inhale. Count to five. Exhale.
Okay.
Just like that. Keep doing that.
In her darkening thoughts, she remembered Ashley’s final words to her, and she pulled up her right sleeve, uncapped that pen, and wrote left-handed on her wrist. Scratchy, half-inked, all caps on her own bare skin:
KENNY WORMSER.
RATHDRUM IDAHO.
912 BLACK LAKE ROAD.
Now it was all really, truly done. Now Jay was saved, and every last angle of Ashley’s disgusting plan had been expunged, dragged into the daylight for judgment. She let the pen slide between her fingers, finally satisfied. When the cops discovered her body frozen here in the snow, they’d read her final message. They’d know they had one last door to kick down, all the way up in Idaho.
I’ve got you, Darby.
Okay.
Don’t be afraid. The long-legged ghost wasn’t real. Now her mother squeezed her tighter, impossibly tight, binding her in this perfect moment, and the terror was finally over. It was just a nightmare, and it’s all finished now. You’re going to be okay. And . . . and Darby?
Yeah?
I’m so proud of you.
DRAFT EMAIL (UNSENT)
12/24/17 5:31 p.m.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Sorry for the delay Ashley, we got our own snowmageddon goin on up here too. The neighbors barn finally caved in and the horses are going apeshit. You won’t even recognize the place.
But yah, you wanted it in writing and you bet, let’s do this thing, 10k upgfront plus 10% of everything I pull after. It’s been awhile since weve done one of these, but I’ve got the bunker ready and two interested fellas already one from Milwaukee, one Portland.
Those meds you’re getting will make her better right, at least for a while? Sick is OK, barfing is NOT OK.
Hope you did a clean job on the schoolbus lady. You should be in Bozeman by now so be here the day after Xmas then? Stay safe, keep Lars’s nose clean and keep off the big roads.
Talk soon, I’ve got someone knocking at the front doo__
EPILOGUE
February 8
Provo, Utah
Jay didn’t realize Darby’s last name was spelled with a silent ‘e’ until she saw it milled into a cement gravestone. Below it, the date of death: December 24.
One day before Christmas.
Seven days before New Year’s.
Forty-six days ago.
She was here with her parents in Darby’s hometown, on a cemetery hillside still scaled with thawing snow, because her father had insisted on making the trip. Originally, he’d wanted to fly here much earlier in January, but Jay’s adrenal condition had flared up with two seizures that left her bedridden and under watch. Finally, she’d been deemed healthy enough for travel last week. All the while, her father had insisted: We have to see Darby Thorne again. We owe her something that can’t be written on a check.
“That’s the one?” he asked now. A few steps downhill, catching up.
“Yeah.”
The hours and days after the incident on the Colorado highway were a sickly blur, but little moments snagged in Jay’s memory. The ache of the IV needle. The roar of the rotor blades. The way the medics had circled and applauded when they carried her onto the helipad of Saint Joseph. The strange blur of the drugs. The way her mother and father came racing down that corridor in dreamy slow motion, their fingers interlocked, holding hands in a way she’d never seen them before. Speaking in choked voices she’d never heard. The three-way hug atop her creaking bed. The taste of salty tears.
The cameras, too. The fuzzy microphones. The investigators, clutching their notepads and tablets, trading gentle questions and sideways glances. The phone interviews with journalists whose accents she could barely understand. The news truck parked outside with an antenna that looked like a ship’s mast. The reverent, almost fearful way people hushed their voices when speaking about the dead, like poor Edward Schaeffer. And Corporal Ron Hill, the highway patrolman who made a tragic, split-second error that cost him his life.
And Darby Thorne.
The one who started it all. The restless, red-eyed art student from an obscure state college in Boulder, racing a beater Honda Civic across the Rockies, who’d first stumbled across a child locked in a stranger’s van and took heroic action to save her.
And, against all odds, succeeded.
Darby came to that rest stop for a reason, Jay’s mother had said back at Saint Joseph. Sometimes God puts people exactly where they need to be.
Even when they don’t know it.
A gust slipped through the cemetery, breathing among the taller gravestones, making Jay shiver, and now her mother caught up to the group, flipping up her sunglasses to read the letter as they coalesced on paper, clearer with every stroke of black crayon. “She . . . she had a pretty name.”
“Yeah. She did.”
Sunlight pierced the clouds and for a few seconds, Jay felt warmth on her skin. A curtain of light swept over the graves, shimmering over granite and frozen grass blades. Then it was gone, snuffed by a biting cold, and Jay’s father slipped his hands into his coat pockets. For a long moment the three of them were silent, listening to the last scratchy rubs of crayon as the headstone transferred to paper.
“Take as long as you need,” he said.
But the etching was finished already. The Scotch tape peeled off the stone, one corner at a time. Then the paper moved away, exposing the engraved letters: MAYA BELLEANGE THORNE.
“What did you mean?” Jay asked. “When I asked you if you loved each other, and you just said, ‘it’s complicated’?”
Darby rolled the rice paper up into a cardboard tube and stood up from her mother’s grave, squeezing Jay’s shoulder.
“It’s alright,” she said. “I was wrong.”
THE END
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