It doesn’t matter what he says—it’s bad, a deep nine-inch gash from the top of his left rib to his hip, black on the edges like the sorrow dagger burned him as it cut.
“We need to get you to a hospital,” I say.
He shakes his head. “And say what, exactly? That I was attacked by a pair of evil twins who cut me with a knife made of sadness?” He winces as I make him lean over the counter so I can get a better look. “It will heal. It should have closed already. I normally heal faster than this.”
“It’s not a normal cut.” I look up at him. “Can I try to fix it?”
“I was kind of hoping that you would.”
I have him sit on the edge of the counter, and I stand in front of him. My mouth is dry with sudden nerves, and I lick my lips and try to concentrate.
Focus.
Strip away everything, all the thoughts, the feelings, the silent accusations, and burrow down to my core. Forget what’s happened. What all I’ve failed to do. Just be.
Call the glory.
A few minutes later I glance up at Christian apologetically, sweat shining on my forehead. He rests his hand on my shoulder to help, to add his strength to mine, and I try again to bring the light.
Again, I fail.
Web wakes up and starts screaming like somebody poked him.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Christian.
“It’ll come back to you,” he says.
I wish I had his certainty. “We can’t leave the wound like this. This needs professional care.”
He shakes his head again. “If you can’t fix it with glory, we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. I’m sure they have a sewing kit around here somewhere.”
Now I’m the one who’s queasy. “Oh no. You should see a doctor.”
“You want to be a doctor, Clara,” he says. “How about you start now?”
After the hard stuff is done, he falls into a deep sleep, thanks in part to the little bottle of hotel whiskey he drank before I started sewing him up. I can’t help but feel that the world is ending, that this is just the first act of something horrible to come, and I curl up next to him.
I watch Web sleeping in his crib. His breathing seems labored and uneven, and it scares me. I lie on the bed on my stomach with my feet dangling over the side and observe his tiny chest moving up and down, afraid that it will suddenly stop, but it doesn’t. He keeps on breathing, and pretty soon, exhausted, I fall asleep.
I’m woken up by my cell phone ringing. For a minute I’m completely disoriented. Where am I? What am I doing here? What’s happened? Web starts crying, and Christian mumbles something and swings out of the bed, groans and clutches his side like he forgot he was hurt, but stumbles over to pick Web up.
I find the phone. It’s Billy.
“Oh, Billy, I’ve been so worried. Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” she exclaims. “What happened to you?”
I tell her. After I finish, she stays quiet for a few minutes. Then she says, “This is bad, kid. The Garter is all over the news. They’re reporting that Anna and Angela Zerbino are dead, the victims of arson.”
“Wait,” I interrupt. “They think Angela’s dead?”
But then I get it. The firemen would have found two bodies in the Garter: Anna and Olivia, and Olivia is nearly the same height and weight as Angela. They’re sisters, if Asael is to be believed, and I think he is. It’s a natural assumption for the authorities to make. I wonder how long it will take for them to figure out their mistake.
“The congregation is also reporting sightings of several suspicious-looking figures lurking in Jackson and the surrounding area, poking around where they shouldn’t be,” continues Billy. “Corbett even spotted a couple of them skulking around the house. They’re definitely looking for you. Where are you?”
“Nebraska.”
“Oh, lord.”
“We didn’t know where to go, so we picked somewhere random,” I say defensively. It might not be the most glamorous place in the world, sure, but it’s also not anywhere that anybody would think to look for us.
“Are you all right?” Billy asks. “No one’s hurt?”
I look at Christian. He’s standing by the window, holding Web flat against his chest and talking to him in a low murmur. He turns and meets my eyes.
“We’re alive,” I answer. “I think that’s pretty good, considering.”
“Okay, listen,” Billy says. “I want you two to sit tight for a few days. I’ll call an emergency meeting of the congregation, and we’ll see if we can come up with some kind of plan. Then I’ll call you. You good with that?”
“Yeah. Sit tight. We can do that.”
“You did the right thing, getting out of here,” she says. “I want you to be extremely careful. Don’t call anybody else. I mean it. No one. Don’t be friendly with anybody. I will feel a whole lot better knowing that I’m the only one who knows where you are. I’ll call you as soon as we have a plan of action.”
A plan of action sounds so good I want to cry.
“Take care of that baby, kid,” she says. “And take care of yourself.” She sighs heavily, then adds, “Sometimes he was so annoying.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Walter. He said this would happen. Infuriating man always had to be right.”
We lie low for a few days. We move to a nicer hotel, one where we have a full kitchen and dining area and living room space, two bedrooms so we can shut the door and watch TV while Web naps. We fall into something of a routine: Web wakes up and starts crying. We play rock, paper, scissors to determine who gets to change his diaper. We attempt to convince him to take a bottle of formula. We try different brands and different types of bottles, but he chokes and sputters and looks generally pissed that Angela is nowhere to be found, and eventually he drinks about two ounces of the stuff. We worry that it’s not enough. After he eats, he pukes. He starts crying again. We clean him up. We rock him, talk to him, sing, turn up white noise on the television, ride the elevator up and down, take him for long drives in the truck, jiggle and soothe and plead, but he cries for hours and hours, usually in the middle of the night.
I’m sure the other guests of the hotel are loving us.
At some point he falls asleep again. Then we tiptoe around, clean ourselves up, brush our teeth, chow down whatever leftovers are in the fridge—we memorize the takeout menus of all the local restaurants, which in Nebraska are a lot of steak houses. I change the dressing on Christian’s wound, which refuses to heal. I try to call the glory. I fail. We talk about anything but what happened at the Garter that night, even though we both know that’s all we can think about. We sit like zombies on the couch watching random shows. And then, too soon, always too soon, Web wakes up and we start the whole thing over.
I’m starting to understand why Angela was cranky.
Still, there are nice moments, too. Funny stuff happens, like once when Web pees on Christian’s T-shirt during a diaper change, right smack on the Coldplay logo, and Christian just nods all calm and says, “So what are you saying, Web?” We laugh until our sides hurt over that one, and it’s good, laughing. It eases the tension.
On the fourth night, as we’re sitting there on the couch after I’ve spent the past hour pacing around with Web yelling in my ear, Christian reaches over and draws my feet into his lap and starts massaging them. I bite back a laugh, because I’m ticklish, then a groan at how good it feels. It’s nice, the feeling that we’re with each other in this, that we’re partners and we’re going to make it through somehow.
“I think I’ve gone deaf,” I say, a running joke between us every time Web suddenly stops crying and falls asleep.
“When did Billy say she’d call, again?” Christian replies, another joke we’ve been telling often, and I laugh.
But something inside me squirms uncomfortably, because all of this feels like a scene we’re acting out of someone else’s life with someone else’s kid, and all we’re doing here is playing house.
Christian’s fingers go still against my ankle. He sighs.
“I’m beat.” He gets up and crosses to the bedroom where Web is sleeping. “I’ll take the first shift. Good night, Clara.”
“Good night.”
He goes into his room and shuts the door. I flip channels for a while, but nothing good’s on. I turn the TV off. It’s early, only nine o’clock, but I wash my face and dress for bed. I check on Web one last time. I lie down.
I dream of Tucker. We’re in his boat on Jackson Lake, stretched out on a blanket in the bottom of the boat, tangled up in each other’s arms, soaking up the sun. The way things used to be. I’m completely at peace, my eyes closed, almost asleep but not quite. I press my face into Tucker’s shoulder and breathe him in. He plays with the short, fine curls at the base of my neck—the baby hair, he calls it. His other hand moves up from my hip to that tender spot below my arm.
“Don’t you tickle me,” I warn, smiling against his skin.
He laughs like I dared him and drags his fingers over the back of my arm, feather lightly, sending a jolt all down my body. I bite his shoulder playfully, which gets another laugh out of him. I raise my head and gaze into his warm blue eyes. We both try to look serious, and fail.
“I think we should stay here, Carrots,” he says. “Forever.”
“I totally agree,” I murmur, and kiss him. “Forever sounds good.”
A shadow passes over us. Tucker and I look up. A bird sails overhead, a huge crow, larger than an eagle, bigger than any other bird I’ve ever seen. It turns in a slow circle high above us, a blot against the blue sky.
Tucker turns to me with worry in his eyes. “It’s only a bird, right?”
I don’t answer. Dread moves like ice freezing in my veins as another bird joins the first, circling, weaving through the air above us. Then another joins, and another, until I can’t keep track. The air seems colder, like the lake could freeze beneath us. I can feel the birds’ eyes on us as they turn, the circle tightening.
“Clara?” Tucker says. His breath comes out in a puff of cloud.
I stare upward, my heart pounding. They’re waiting for the right moment to swoop down, to tear into us with their sharp beaks and claws. To rip us apart.
They’re waiting.
The way vultures will circle a thing that’s dead or dying. That’s how they’re looking at us.
“Oh, well,” says Tucker, shrugging. “We always knew this was too good to last.”
The next morning, Christian and I do dishes. We’re standing shoulder to shoulder at the sink, me washing, him drying, when he says out of the blue, “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Okay,” I say warily.
He goes out of the room for a minute, and when he comes back, he’s holding a black-and-white composition notebook.
Angela’s journal.
“You went back,” I say, astonished.
He nods. “Last night. I flew back to the Garter. I found it in a trunk in her bedroom that didn’t burn.”
“Why?” I gasp. “That was so dangerous! Billy said there are Black Wings there, looking. You could have been—”
Caught. Killed. Taken off to hell. And I would never have known what happened to him.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t want her journal to fall into the wrong hands. I mean, who knows what Angela wrote about us in here? Or about the congregation? And I just wanted to … do something. I have so many questions. I thought maybe this would give us some answers. I was up all night reading it.”
“So did you find what you were looking for?” I ask softly, not sure whether to be furious at him for taking such a risk or relieved that he came back unharmed.
His mouth twists. “There’s a lot of stuff in there. Research. Poems. A detailed account of all Web’s soiled diapers. A list of songs Anna sang him to get him to sleep. And Angela’s thoughts, how she felt about things. She was tired, and angry, and scared, but she wanted what was best for Web. She was making plans.”
And now she won’t get to carry any of them out, I think. I don’t know exactly where Angela is, not exactly, but I do know something of hell. It’s cold and colorless. Bleak. Full of despair. I get a tightness in my chest, imagining Angela in that place, the hopelessness she must feel. The pain.
“And there was a last entry, written down fast,” Christian says. “She got a text from Phen that night. He warned her that the Black Wings were coming. She only had a minute to hide Web, but Phen gave her that minute.”
So Phen’s not all bad, is what he’s saying. But somehow that doesn’t make me feel much better about him. Because he was the one who got her in this mess to begin with.
“Anyway,” Christian says. “I wanted to tell you.”
He holds the journal out to me, an offering, but I don’t take it. I don’t know how I feel about reading her diary now that she’s gone. That’s her private stuff.
“I’ll put it on the nightstand,” he says. “If you want to read it.”
“No, thanks,” I reply, although I’m curious.
We go back to doing dishes, silent now, each of us lost in our own thoughts. Christian’s thinking about the journal, something that Angela must have written, something about Web and family. After a while he says, “Do you ever think about that day in the cemetery?”
He means do I ever think about the kiss. Do I ever think about us.
I don’t think I can handle this conversation. Not right now. “You’re the mind reader. You tell me,” I joke weakly.
But the truth is, yes, I think about it. When we’re walking together and he naturally takes my hand. When he looks up at me across the table at dinner, laughing at a joke I’ve told, his green-gold eyes all bright. When we pass each other on the way to the bathroom, his hair wet from the shower, his tank top clinging to him damply, the smell of his shaving gel wafting off him. I think about how easy it would be to accept this life. To be with him.
I think about what it would be like to go into the same room at the end of the night. I do. I think about it. Even if that makes me feel like a bad person, because he’s not the only guy I think that way about.
“It’s clean,” he observes, and gently takes the dish I’ve been vigorously scrubbing.
“I think about it,” he says after a minute.
He’s not going to let it go.
“Do you think you would have done it all on your own?” I ask.
He stares at me, surprised at my question. “On my own?”
“Well, kissing me was part of your vision, so you knew what was going to happen. You said, ‘You’re not going to go,’ when I wanted to leave. Because you knew I would stay. You knew you would kiss me, and I would let you.”
Something works in his throat. He drops his head, a curl of hair falling into his eyes, and gazes into the sink like there’s some mysterious answer to be found in the soapy dishwater.
“Yes, I kissed you in a vision,” he says finally. “But it didn’t turn out the way I thought it would.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought …” I feel his disappointment then, his embarrassment, his wounded pride.
“You thought if we kissed, we’d be together,” I say for him.
“Yes. I thought we’d be together.” He shrugs. “Not my time, I guess.”
He’s waiting. He’s still waiting. He’s given up everything for me. His entire life. His future. Everything, because he wants to keep me safe. Because he believes, in his heart, that he’s my purpose and I’m his.
“For the record, it was on my own.” He tucks the dish towel into the handle of the refrigerator, then steps closer to me. “I wanted to kiss you,” he murmurs. “Me. Not because of some vision I saw. Because of you. Because of what I feel.”
The words hang between us for a second, and then he leans in, strokes my cheek with the back of his hand, and kisses me, gently, without pressure. He keeps his lips against mine for a long moment, brushing softly. Heat rise
s between us. Time slows. I see the future he imagines: always together, always there for each other. We are partners. Best friends. Lovers. We travel the world together. We build a life with each other, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. We raise Web as our own, and if trouble comes knocking, we face it. Together.
We belong together.
He pulls away. His eyes search mine, the flecks of gold like sparks, asking me a question.
“I …,” I start, but I have no idea how I’m going to answer. I want to say yes, but something’s stopping me.
My cell phone starts to ring.
He sighs. “Answer it,” he says. “Go on.”
I answer the phone.
“All right, kid,” Billy says, not even bothering with a greeting. “It’s time to come in. Can you be in the meadow by Friday night?”
I look at Christian. Should we go back to Wyoming? It’s safe here, where nobody knows where to find us. Web’s safe here. We could stay.
“Sure, why not?” he says, too lightly. “What have we got to lose?”
So much, I think then. There is still so very much to lose.
16
CLARA LUX IN OBSCURO
As far as I can tell, every single member of the congregation is gathered around the campfire by the time we arrive in the meadow on Friday night, and when we step into the circle, me cradling Web in my arms, everyone goes quiet.
I’ve never seen so many worried faces.
“Well,” says Stephen, after a minute. Apparently he’s the master of ceremonies at tonight’s event. “Have a seat, both of you.”
Great. No small talk, no good to see you in one piece—straight to the interrogation.
People scoot to make room for us at the front of the circle, and we hunker down in the grass. I pull the blanket more tightly around Web, like that will shield him from all the curious stares he’s getting. He reaches a tiny hand out in the direction of the fire, his golden eyes reflecting the light.
“Before we open this up for discussion,” Corbett Phibbs says, stepping forward, “we’d like to hear what happened, in your own words. That way we’ll all be sure to understand.”