“I’m not sure. We can figure it out when we get back to the table.”
Eric seemed to have decided that their table—that being whichever table Michael sat at—was also his table. Even given his concerns, most of which she still didn’t understand and most of which she was now certain she didn’t want to understand, he was pleasant and low-key company. He listened to Michael without eye rolling, which was pretty much the only requirement in a lunch companion at this table.
Not, Emma thought, if she was being fair, that she didn’t sometimes engage in eye rolling, but she felt she’d earned that, and Michael understood what it meant when she did it. Michael didn’t ask her about her father, for which she was grateful. It was a normal day, and Emma wanted to hold on to the normal for as long as she could.
But as they were filing out of the cafeteria, Emma noticed that Allison was hanging back, and she was doing it in front of Eric. She started to say something and thought better of it, following Michael out of the cafeteria instead.
Allison was clearly nervous. Determined, but nervous.
Eric, leaning on the warped wood of the stair railing on portable D, watched her, waiting. He didn’t look bored, and he didn’t look angry; he didn’t seem confused. He just…waited. When it became clear that waiting was going to be rewarded with a lot of awkward silence, he cleared his throat. “You wanted to talk to me?”
She nodded. And then said “Yes,” just in case.
He waited for a bit longer. “Allison—”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and looked at her feet. “It’s about Emma.” She looked up in time to see the way his expression changed. It closed up, like a trap.
“Ah. I’m not interested in Emma in that way,” he said carefully.
“She’s really not looking for anyone,” Allison said, at the same time. The words collided. It was all so awkward.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
“Beginning?”
“You want to tell me why she’s not looking for anyone. Or anyone special.” When Allison nodded, he took his arm off the railing and shoved his hands into his front pockets. And waited. Then, when it became clear the awkwardness wasn’t going away anytime soon, he very quietly took the threads of the conversation into his own, figurative, hands.
“You’ve known her for a long time?”
“Since we were six. Well, I was five.”
“You’ve been friends since then?”
Allison nodded.
“You’re not really like her, though.”
“No.”
“And you’re not really interested in the same things.”
“Some of the same things, but…no.” Allison hesitated. “You’ve met Amy.”
“It’s impossible to be a student at Emery and not meet Amy.”
“Do you like her?”
Eric shrugged. “She’s a girl.”
“I hated her, in junior high.”
Eric’s brow lifted slightly, as if in surprise.
“I hated that age,” Allison added softly. “I thought she was so full of herself, and so cruel. But Emma liked her,” she added.
“Emma liked you.”
“Out of habit. But it was Emma who told me that Amy’s not cruel on purpose. She doesn’t enjoy being mean—she’s just thoughtless; she’s caught up in her own life and in her own problems. Just as I was then. To Emma, Amy was important. Amy’s friendship was important. You’ve seen Em,” Allison added. “Emma fits in with them. She always has.”
“She doesn’t seem to spend much time with them, now.”
“No. She worked hard,” Allison said, staring out into the field, or into a memory. She lost the nervous look, and her hands fell to her sides. “She worked hard to belong. She did what they did, went where they went. I was so afraid of losing her. I was jealous. Of them.”
“Ah.”
“But…we survived. It was even harder, for me, when Emma started seeing Nathan.”
“Nathan?”
“Her boyfriend. He died this summer, in a car accident. They were always together. Things she’d do with me—things that she couldn’t do with Amy and her friends—she started doing with Nathan instead. She spent all her time with him. Even Amy was getting annoyed. Nathan was quiet, though. He was never mean, and he was never showy. I liked him,” she added, “and I hated him. I never told her about the hate part.”
“I won’t,” he said softly.
“But when he died…It was bad. I don’t even remember who told me, but it wasn’t Emma. She came to school and she did her work and she hung out with Amy, but…she’d stopped caring. She always seems so self-confident to people who meet her now. It’s not that, though—she just doesn’t care anymore. She says what she’s thinking because she doesn’t care what other people think about her. None of it matters.
“And I felt guilty for a long time, because I sometimes wanted Nathan to go away. I wish he hadn’t,” she added, her voice still soft. “Because Emma is always “fine” now. Even at the burial, she was fine.” She took a deep breath. “And Amy, who I always thought of as selfish? After Nathan died, she gathered all of us together, and she tried to arrange a different schedule for Michael, so that Emma would have time to grieve and pull herself together.”
“She offered that to Emma?”
“No. But she was thinking of Emma, of what Emma had lost. They treat her a little differently now than they used to. They understand, and they try to give her space. All the stupid social games they used to play? They don’t play them with Emma anymore.” She frowned. “They still play them with each other, though.”
“So if Amy arranged for someone else to meet Michael, why is he coming to school with the two of you?”
“I told them no.”
He stared at her, his expression odd. “Why?”
“Because Michael hadn’t changed. He still needed Em. And I think Emma needed the responsibility of watching him, the way she’d always done. Besides,” she added, with a grimace, “Michael would have taken three months to readjust to a new routine, and Michael needed to know that Nathan, not Emma, was gone. Nathan understood Michael. It was why Emma started to like him in the first place.”
“You’re worried about her.”
Allison nodded. “Emma has always gotten along with Michael because Emma sees Michael. She doesn’t see what she wants him to be; she doesn’t see what he lacks. She just sees what he is, and she understands it. She sees me the same way. She doesn’t think about “normal.” She just sees what we are. Mostly only the good parts,” she added. “But they’re still true.
“When Nathan died, Emma’s mother always tried to offer comfort, and Emma didn’t want it. She spent a lot of time at my house, because my mother didn’t. My mom didn’t need Emma to cry or scream or be angry or grieve. She let Emma be. And that’s what Emma needed. It’s hard,” Allison added. “Sometimes it’s hard. But I try to do the same.”
“And you’re telling me that’s what I have to do?”
Allison nodded.
History was the last class of the day, and Emma approached it warily, watching for any signs of the odd dislocation that could be mistaken for concussion symptoms. Allison was watching her as well. They made their way to their seats.
Emma blinked.
“Em?”
She heard the word from a long way off; it was a tinny sound, something small and so stretched she could tell it was Allison talking only because Allison used that single syllable so effectively. She could hear the droning of Ms. Kagayama, but that, too, could barely be resolved into a familiar voice; there were no words.
No, that wasn’t true. There were no familiar words, and the words that she could hear were spoken in so many voices, all overlapping, they almost made her dizzy. But the voices were clearer, and if it seemed as if there were thousands of them, they were distinct. This time, instead of fading into painful noise, they stayed at the edge of a shout, a chorus of shouts.
She b
linked again, and she realized why.
She had thought that light hurt her eyes. Yesterday and the day before, she would have sworn it. But she realized now that it wasn’t the light, it was the images that swirled around her vision, sharpest at the periphery. They formed an aurora of scintillating colors—but they had shapes now, textures that she recognized.
Clothing. Hair. Faces.
None of them stayed in one place long enough for her to really look. But she had the sense that she was standing still and they were streaming past, shouting, screaming, or crying as they did.
“Em?”
She lifted a hand. She couldn’t speak and look at the same time. And she wanted to look. She had told Eric she would try, but she wanted to see her father. Or hear him. She wouldn’t touch him again, she promised herself that much. But it was hard. Her head began to pound with the effort it took to keep looking, to listen, to break out one voice from the multitude.
But she managed, somehow.
And realized, as she did, that it was not her father’s voice that she had reached for and not, therefore, her father that she could see.
Instead, she saw fire, and she shouted, bringing her hands up to cover her face. She would have let go, then. She would have let go and slid into oblivion and nausea and darkness. But she could see, wreathed in fire, the face of a small child, and she could hear, in the distance, the screams. No, the scream. One voice. One voice shouting words that were familiar because Emma had typed them, in a half-trance, on the day of the first headache.
Oh my god Drew help me help me Drew fire god no
She stood—she managed to stand.
Allison was standing as well; she felt Allison’s hand on her arm. And then she felt a familiar arm encircle her shoulder. It was tight, meant to brace her and hold her up. She swallowed, closed her eyes, and forced them open again.
She heard Eric’s voice, and his voice was blessedly clear. “Strength, Emma.” It was a whisper of sound, a tickle in her ear. But she could hear it. She nodded and managed to say, “Take me home.”
She felt herself being lifted.
“Strength,” Eric said again.
She nodded.
She threw up in the parking lot. Eric seemed to expect this, and although he set her down, he hovered. “Where’s Allison?” she asked, as she pushed herself to her feet.
“I told her to stay. There’s not much she can do.”
“And she listened?”
He chuckled. “Very reluctantly. I’m not sure she trusts me.”
“She’s smarter than I am,” Emma said. She caught his arm. Her knees felt like rubber, but they held. “I think I can walk,” she told him, as he put an arm around her shoulder.
Drew
She closed her eyes. “How can you live like this?” she whispered.
“I don’t see what you see now.”
“Oh. Did you ever?”
“Never. I am not what I fear you are, Emma.”
DREW
One voice in the maelstrom. She opened her eyes to fire; fire and black, thick smoke. She could almost taste it, and fell to her knees against the asphalt. Eric picked her up. He had never looked particularly large to Emma, but he carried her as easily as Brendan Hall had when she had been a small girl.
“Eric.”
His arms tightened, but he continued to walk. “Em,” he whispered. “Don’t do this. Please.”
She opened her eyes; she could see his profile, because her head was resting against his shoulder. His eyes were faintly luminescent in her vision, although they were also dark brown; his jaw was tensed, as if with effort. She said, “Eric, there’s a child—”
He almost missed a step, but he caught himself—and Emma—before they both fell.
“There’s a child, in the fire.”
“What fire, Emma?” He asked it as if she were a fevered child. It should have irritated her, but it didn’t. She wasn’t sure why.
“I don’t know. There’s a fire and a child standing in it. There’s smoke, it’s thick and heavy. And I can hear one voice, over all the other voices.”
He had reached his car, and now set her down close to the front passenger seat. He unlocked the door manually, and then put an arm around her waist as she slid into the car. She felt the vinyl against her legs; it was warm.
“But, Eric,” she continued, as he closed the door gently and walked around the front of the car to the driver’s side. She waited while he slid behind the steering wheel. “Eric?”
“I’m here. Take this,” he added, and handed her a small bucket. “I thought you might need it.”
“The voice I hear sounds different. It’s not—it’s not like the other voices.”
“How is it different?” He spoke patiently and slowly.
“I don’t know for certain—I can’t shut the other voices out, not completely, so it’s hard to listen.” She grimaced, and added, “and I can see the child.”
“Now?”
“Yes.” She’d already nodded a couple of times, but this time remembered that speaking was less painful.
Drew oh my god oh god
He started the car.
“He’s not very old. I think he’s four. Maybe a bit older, maybe a bit younger, it’s hard to tell.” And she was concentrating now. Her vision was a strange collage of things she expected to see and things it should have been impossible to see.
The phone rang. She blinked. The fire wavered, its roar diminishing to a crackle. She automatically reached into her pocket before she realized that the ringtone was wrong; it wasn’t her phone.
It rang again. “Eric, I think that’s your phone.”
He said nothing, and Emma listened to it ring three more times before it fell silent. When it did, the roar of the fire returned.
The child’s eyes were wide, and she could see black tears trace the delicate lines of his cheeks. He was staring at her, his lips slightly open.
“Yes,” Emma said, although she couldn’t say why. “Yes, I’m coming.” She turned to Eric. “Go left here.”
The car rolled to a halt. He opened his mouth, and shut it when the phone rang again.
“Are you going to answer that?”
“No. I know who it is.”
“Without looking?”
“Not many people have my number. What do you mean, turn left here?”
“We have to drive that way,” she replied, lifting a shaking arm.
“Why, Emma?”
“Because we—we just have to drive that way.”
Eric lifted a hand to his face. “All right. All right, we’ll play it your way for now.”
Eric followed Emma’s ad hoc directions. Emma concentrated on staying upright. She gave right, left, and straight calls, and he followed them, paying attention to the lights. But she must have given him the wrong direction, because he turned instead of going straight, and Emma screamed as the car drove up a curb, over an unwatered lawn, and into a large shed.
“Eric!”
His knuckles whitened on the wheel, and she watched as the shed and the car converged. The car passed right through it, leaving no wood, boards, or broken glass in its wake. She turned to look over her shoulder; there was nothing at all behind them but a two lane residential street.
He glanced at her once, but said nothing.
“I’ll just stick with directions,” she said, shakily. “Sorry for screaming.”
One-way streets made the drive more difficult. Eric attempted to follow her directions, but told her curtly that he found having a driver’s license convenient when he was forced, by street signs, to ignore Emma. “It would help,” he added, as his phone began to ring again, “if you knew any of the street names.”
She did. She just didn’t know these streets. “Eric, can you answer the damn phone?”
“No.”
“Then give the damn thing to me, and I’ll answer it.”
“No.”
She rubbed her temples. It didn’t help, but it
gave her something to do with her hands other than try to strangle Eric. Given that Emma didn’t have her license, strangling the only driver in an increasingly unfamiliar part of town seemed like a bad idea. As if to argue with that, the phone started ringing again immediately after it had stopped.
Eric ignored it. Emma gritted her teeth and tried to do the same. “Has it ever occurred to you that it could be an emergency?” she asked, through those gritted teeth.
“Just keep your mind on the road.”
She did. She found it easier as the driving continued. It wasn’t that the light, and the quality of its shifting images, lessened; the opposite happened. But as those phantasms grew more concrete and she could hold the images in the center of her vision as if they were just another part of the landscape, the pain decreased.
And the voices dimmed as well, until there was only one voice, screaming to be heard against the cracking of timber and the roar of fire.
Emma said, “Here, Eric.”
But the car had already rolled to a stop.
The phone rang.
It was pretty difficult, in the city of Toronto, to find any patch of land that did not have a building on it. This one was a partial exception; it had what looked like the remnants of several buildings, with partly blackened walls, a total lack of glass in window frames, and boards over where the doors would have been.
Emma experienced, for a second time, the sudden cessation of noise and light. This time, though, she could feel the movement of all of these things as they left her in a rush, condensing, at last, to a single point that existed outside of her head. She shook her head, partly to clear it, and partly because sitting this close to a row of burned out townhouses wasn’t something she did every day.
Eric turned the engine off and glanced at her.
“Here,” she said quietly. She started to tell him that she no longer had the headache and then gave up; his expression made clear that he knew. And that, unlike Emma, he wasn’t happy about it.
She opened the car door and slid out of the car. “Do you want to wait here?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Eric replied. He opened his door, and his phone rang. Again.
“Look, if you don’t want to answer it, and you don’t want me to answer it, why don’t you just throw it away or step on it or something?”