The First Time I Died

by Joanne Macgregor

  Holding the flame of a lighter under the teaspoon, he moved it around in small circles until the golden liquid bubbled.

  “Nah. He doesn’t want to see me, not really. Not like this. He doesn’t want to know what I’m doing as long as I stay away and don’t steal his booze or prescription pads.”

  “You stole whole pads?”

  He drew the liquid in the spoon up into the syringe. “Hey, gotta be some perks to having a drunk doctor for a father.”

  “And now you’re farming pot?” I guessed.

  He gave me a lazy smile. “I got a few plantations here and there in the woods.”

  “I got the idea from your sister that you were doing more than growing weed.”

  “Fuck her. She never could keep her mouth shut.” He held the syringe up, flicked a dirty finger against the side. “Yeah, I’m cooking, so what? Got a base up the hill.” He jerked his head in the direction of the woods on the hill behind the trailer.

  “Anybody else know about that?”

  “I sometimes see drones flying around out here, so yeah, probably somebody does.”

  “Hugo’s UFOs!”

  “What now?”

  “Nothing.” I waved the word away. “So, someone’s spying on you. Do you think it’s the government — cops, or maybe the feds?”

  As I said the last word, it occurred to me that Colby may have been calling the FBI about the drug situation in town. He wouldn’t have trusted Turner to handle it properly.

  “Doubt it, man.” Blunt slowly pressed the syringe plunger until a single drop oozed out of the needle tip. “They wouldn’t care that much about the pot, and if they saw the lab, they’d have raided me by now.”

  “Maybe they can’t see through the cover of trees?”

  He shrugged, examined his arm carefully, selected a spot below his wrist and slid the needle upwards into a vein. “That was the idea.”

  “Who else could it be?”

  “Dunno.” He drew a little blood up into the syringe. “Maybe my dad. Maybe someone he paid off checking to see I’m keeping away from the estate.”

  A phone on the table vibrated and rang — a jarring note that made me jump in surprise.

  Blunt glanced over at the display and gave a grunt of surprise. “Will you get that?” he asked me. “My hands are kinda full at the moment.”

  The phone display read The Bitch.

  “Hello, James Armstrong’s residence,” I said.

  Blunt threw back his head and laughed.

  “Garnet? Can I speak to my brother please?” It was Jessica, and she sounded upset.

  I held the phone up to Blunt’s ear.

  “Yeah?” His fingers stilled as he listened. “What? When? …” He let go of the syringe, leaving the needle stuck into his arm, and grabbed the phone from me, pressing it against his ear. “How? … Yeah … Yeah.”

  “What is it?” I asked as soon as he ended the call.

  He tossed the phone aside. “My father’s dead.” He released the tourniquet. “And get this, man, it was an overdose.”

  He pressed the plunger in all the way, steadily pushing oblivion into his veins. His eyes rolled back, his lids drooped, his body slumped. And he was gone.

  40

  NOW

  Thursday December 21, 2017

  While Blunt tripped on smack inside his trailer, I paced in the snow outside, tripping on guilt.

  Behind the trailer, the forest of blue-gray sentinels, limbs sagging under their cold weight of white, stood guard over Blunt’s secrets. Mist shrouded the valley and dampened the sound of the highway beyond. Up here, all was silent except for the snow which squeaked beneath my feet. I could already feel the freezing wet permeating my running shoes; I needed new boots. I kicked at a beer bottle, sending it an unsatisfying few feet away. Small flakes of snow drifted down from the heavy, steel sky.

  Doc Armstrong was dead. Why hadn’t I paid attention to the niggles about him? I’d had a bad feeling, felt him falling asleep — drifting into a death-bound coma, I now realized — but I’d been determined to follow my own nose. If I’d gone to him first, I may have been able to save his life. Admittedly not for very long, but, a selfish part of me pointed out, for long enough to get more information out of him. Now that opportunity was lost.

  I picked up the bottle, welcoming the burn of cold on my tender fingertips — I needed to wake up. Or maybe what I really needed was to drift more fully into the dream. Being one leg inside Colby’s circle and one leg out wasn’t working. I had to choose. Either I was going to be true to myself — the self I had been all my life: rational, logical, scientific, despising all things mystical and spiritual — or I was going to abandon everything I believed and respected, and instead allow the possibility of a whole other world, kiss the person I’d always been goodbye and step into a whole other self. Embrace what I most disdained in my mother.

  What did I have to lose? Either I was getting messages from beyond the veil — I rolled my eyes at that phrase — or I wasn’t. If I wasn’t, if the weird experiences I’d had weren’t really paranormal, then I was already crazy and suffering from the symptoms of psychosis. But if it was real, if Colby was trying to connect with me?

  I threw the bottle at the nearest tree, hitting a low branch and setting off a small snowfall.

  Once, on a family vacation in Maine, I’d gone horse riding with a bunch of older, more experienced teenagers, and I’d known from the start that my mount — an Appaloosa ominously named Tempest — was definitely the boss of our relationship. He’d fought me for control all the way out and all the way back to the resort.

  The return route passed alongside a grass airstrip backing a campground. Our guide warned us to hold our horses when we approached this.

  “They always get excited here, because they can smell the stables. Do not let them bolt!”

  I shortened my reins and held them as tight as I could as the horse danced sideways, tossing its head and straining at the bit. My arm muscles bulged and burned as I tried to control the thousand pounds of muscle and defiance beneath me, but there was no way I was going to win this battle of wills, and the horse knew it. There was a moment, magnified into timeless clarity by sheer terror, where I contemplated my options. And chose surrender.

  I loosed the reins and gave the horse its head, trusting it knew where it was going. Behind us, the guide screamed something, but the wind in my ears whipped it away. I held onto the pommel for dear life as we galloped down the airstrip, ducked as we hurtled under a low tree branch, hung onto the beast’s neck as it jumped a small stream, and yelled in terrified exhilaration as it careened around tents and trailers in the campground.

  We charged down a dirt road curving around the resort hotel and entered the stable yard at top speed. I flattened myself on the horse’s back as it stamped into its stall, narrowly avoiding decapitation from the doorframe. Amazed that I was still alive and in one piece, I’d slid off the saddle and staggered out into the cobbled yard on trembling legs.

  Now, standing in the falling snow outside Blunt’s trailer, I again felt like I had back then, when I’d stared down the length of runway, contemplating giving in to a force I’d underestimated and couldn’t control. Again, I surrendered.

  Even as I wondered if I was psychotic, I opened myself up and spoke into the cold, quiet air. “Colby, are you there?”

  I stopped and listened — with my ears, but also with my body, with my long-frozen heart. A surge of love — warm, intense enough to make my chest hurt, so bright it made me gasp — washed through me.

  Real.

  Love.

  You.

  The words and feelings swirled around inside and came to rest in a soft, quiet calm.

  I puffed out a breath and spoke out loud again, “Colby? I sure as shit hope this stuff is coming from you, because from now on, I’m going to treat it like it is. I want to solve your murder and bring your killers to justice. You want that, don’t you?” A snowflake landed on the tip of
my nose. “And to do that, I need your help, okay?”

  Silence.

  “So, let’s cut to the chase: do you know who killed you?”

  Nothing. Nothing in my head and nothing in my body. I rubbed my freezing arms and stared hard into a nearby bank of snow — though what I was looking for, I couldn’t have said. Perhaps a raven dropping stones on the snow to spell out the name of the culprit? It occurred to me that Colby was as clueless at sending messages as I was at decoding them.

  “Come on, Colby, bring it. You’ve got memories? Send them. Got ideas? I’m waiting. Let’s do this so we can solve it, and you can rest in peace, and I can get on with the rest of my life. Let me have it.”

  For a moment nothing happened.

  Then a flood of yellow blinded me, knocking me sideways.

  “Yellow? Again? I don’t know what that means!” I yelled aloud.

  Immediately, the mustard saturation was supplanted by scenes from the attack down at the pond.

  Again, the hands on my shoulders, the shouts, the dark, hidden faces, the devastating pain.

  More than one!

  “Two attackers, you can’t see who they are, it hurt — I know. You’ve showed me all that before. Give me something new already!”

  An image of a box wavered in my vision. It was just like the box of Colby’s stuff his mother had given me, only it was completely empty.

  “An empty box? That’s very helpful. No, really, thanks for that,” I snapped into thin air.

  Nothing.

  “Sulking, now? You need to do better, Colby.”

  Shivering with cold, and perhaps madness, I tramped to my car and drove back down the hill to the highway. I needed to buy flowers and pay a condolence visit to Jessica and her mother, and I dreaded the thought of it. No doubt it was going to be super uncomfortable — I was pretty sure they would both still be upset with me and would find no comfort in my presence. But it still needed to be done. I might be taking directions from a spirit, but I wasn’t lost to the dictates of convention and good manners. I’d spend the afternoon doing what I could to help out. Maybe I’d follow in another of my mother’s footsteps and do the dishes. That way I could be useful and hide out in the kitchen at the same time.

  “Further transmissions and investigations will have to wait until tomorrow,” I told Colby. “That means you have tonight to hone your skills. Maybe get a few tips from some of the other entities on your side? Because if I have to ask my mother for help, I’ll kill you.”

  41

  NOW

  Friday December 22, 2017

  The next morning, I made a list of all the words and images I’d received from the ether so far. Nothing new had arrived since the visions outside Blunt’s trailer; perhaps Colby was still peeved at my less-than-enthusiastic attitude.

  I booted up my laptop, opened my browser and typed the word “yellow” into the search bar. About 7,580,000,000 results, Google declared. Great, shouldn’t take long at all.

  The first hit was a song by Coldplay. I let it play in the background while I sifted through the results that followed. Definitions and synonyms, math games, book titles, apps and online courses, videos, student hostels, and a conspiracy theory about the McDonald’s arch that would have delighted Hugo. I looked for images and scrolled through pics of yellow things — bananas, splotches of paint, roses, sunflowers, police crime scene tape, emojis, egg yolks, radioactivity warning signs, bell peppers, chrysanthemums and fall leaves. It went on for pages and pages.

  Nothing sparked an epiphany.

  I clicked on a picture listing different shades of yellow — amber, butterscotch, canary, cadmium, fire, gold, lemon, ochre, sunshine and mustard. I read through the entire entry on “yellow” in Wikipedia — science and nature, history, art, pigments and dyes, minerals and chemistry, symbolism, associations and idioms — and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the color. I read about its wavelength and position on the color spectrum, how carotenoids in plants absorbed light energy and protected against photodamage, that it was one of the first colors used in cave paintings, and that it was associated with Chinese emperors, the pope, the keys to the kingdom (whatever that might be), but also with Judas Iscariot, and that it had been used to mark heretics in early times and Jews in more recent history. Was any of this relevant?

  Depending on your religion and culture, the color was associated with health, happiness, warmth and courage, but also with sickness, envy, avarice, duplicity and cowardice. Nothing confusing about that, then.

  From metaphysical sites, I discovered that yellow symbolized harmony through conflict — harmony through conflict, what did that even mean? — and that yellow was the color of the third, solar plexus chakra, and was the main hue in the aura of people in intellectual occupations. Professor Perry would’ve called this a load of buggery bollocks. I would’ve agreed.

  The main yellow gemstones were citrine, tourmaline, yellow jasper, sapphires, diamonds, topaz and garnets. That last one was new to me — I’d only ever thought garnets came in ruby red. Could the yellow refer to my name, to me? Each of the stones had different meanings and uses; if there was a commonality, I sure couldn’t find it.

  I gave up on trying to figure out what the yellow visions meant and decided to focus on the image of the empty box. Once more I retrieved the container Bridget had given me and dumped the contents onto my bed. I examined the interior and exterior of the box, inspecting every square inch, but found nothing unusual. I closed my eyes and cocked my head, waiting for a signal from the beyond.

  More nothing.

  Maybe the image of the empty box meant I was supposed to unpack it and then check its contents for some clue. I picked up the funeral program with Colby’s photo on the front, examined it inside and out, held it tight in both hands against my chest in anticipation of a mystical message, but felt only the old sadness, the bitter consciousness of waste.

  One by one, I held each item before packing it back into the box. At the end of the exercise, I was still no wiser than I had been at the beginning. Exasperated, I ran my fingertips over the coverlet, feeling for the catch of a rough nail edge on the fabric. Finding one, I tore a strip off the nail with my teeth and immediately knew it’d gone too deep, right into the nail bed. That would hurt for days.

  A new thought struck me: maybe there was something not in the box that was supposed to be there? I wracked my brains but couldn’t think of anything. Grabbing my phone, I hit dial on Cassie’s number.

  “Hey, it’s Garnet here, how are you doing?”

  “Same old, same old. How are you doing? Find anything yet?”

  “Nothing definite,” I hedged. “I wondered, though, whether you took anything else of Colby’s back then? Something that maybe your mom would’ve hung onto if she’d found it afterward?”

  “No,” she said slowly, “nothing I can remember. He was always accusing me of taking and hiding stuff, but he’d usually just misplaced it himself. Honestly, I only took little things — a pack of gum, maybe, or his lip balm. Do you remember he used to always have that cola-flavored type?”

  The memory of the scent came to me as strongly as if I could smell it. For me it would always be the smell of kisses. “I do.”

  “Oh, wait. I did once steal a bobble-head miniature figurine of Gollum—”

  “Who?”

  “Gollum — from Lord of the Rings?”

  “Oh, right.” I didn’t read fantasy; I’d always struggled to connect with the far-fetched stories and mythical themes. Which seemed ironic now, given how things had turned out. “And his laptop?”

  “No. Honest, the only important thing I ever took was his phone. I’d tell you if there was anything else.”

  Disappointed, I ended the call, promising to give her an update soon.

  I glared at the box on my bed, willing it to reveal its secret. There was something important in or about this box, there had to be, but I was too stupid to see it. My groan of frustration was interrupted by a
thought — the boxes in our basement. Some of them were similar to this one. I slipped on a sweater and shoes and ran downstairs.

  Dad must have replaced the globe in the basement light, because it was working again. I glanced around, searching for any boxes I hadn’t yet checked, and found only two, both of which only contained stacks of old National Geographic magazines. Nothing about their dusty contents or cobwebby exteriors sparked anything in my crowded brain. I was about to leave when my gaze fell on the stack of my father’s planners crammed on the shelf above the workbench.

  Although I was certain that my dad was not a deranged serial killer who’d also murdered my boyfriend in a rage at him having unprotected sex with seventeen-year-old me, I still reached up and wiggled out the ones with 2006 and 2007 stamped on their spines.

  Just then, the light above me flickered for a few seconds, and although it held, the cold around me suddenly intensified. A prickle of primitive fear rippled up my spine. For the first time it occurred to me that if there was some kind of life beyond this one, if there were spirits like Colby, then there might also be more malevolent entities.

  “Shut up, Garnet. You’re a moron.” Trying to bolster my flagging courage, I spoke out loud, but my voice came out weak and breathy.

  I marched over to the stairs and began climbing. Halfway up, I was overcome by an atavistic urge to run. My careful steps turned to bounding leaps, covering several stairs at a time, and when I got to the top, I slammed the door behind me. Then locked it.

  My mother was in the kitchen, perched on a stool in front of the stovetop. “I’m making breakfast for you — pancakes and syrup, your favorite.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be back down soon,” I panted.

  Back in my bedroom, I opened the 2007 planner at the date of Colby’s death. At the bottom of a page of reminders for the store, was a notation written in black: RIP Colby Beaumont (1989-2007). Was my father even now making a similar entry in this year’s planner for Doc Armstrong? If Ryan hadn’t fished me out of the drink, would there have been an entry for me?