But: Jeremiah.
Jeremiah, I’m waiting.
Waiting in the dark.
He’d never had much of an imagination. West hadn’t been able to imagine the two of them together, not until the very moment that he’d pressed his lips to Nick’s for the first time and slipped his hands under Nick’s shirt and tasted sweat and sweet and felt muscle flex beneath slick flesh. Even then, he’d lacked the vision to see what to do next. To see how they could be what they needed to be to each other. To imagine his life as anything other than what it was.
And then Nick was gone, and West couldn’t have imagined what that would be like, either. The worst of it – the worst of the black despair that sucked him down and down and down – was that he now couldn’t imagine escaping it.
He certainly couldn’t imagine Nick back to life.
But: The wind. The whispers.
I’m cold here.
I’m alone here.
Here in the dark.
Waiting for you.
There was a crash of broken glass, and West swallowed a scream. But it wasn’t a vengeful ghost. It was just an idiot punching his fist through a window. “What the hell?”
Matt had, at least, been smart enough to wrap his T-shirt around his fist before slamming it into the rainbow display window of Green’s Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Shoppe. He shrugged. “Emily said she wanted ice cream.”
“I said I wished it was open,” she gasped through her laughter.
“Now it is.” Baz widened the hole in the glass enough to reach through and unlatch the door. The consummate gentleman, he held it open for Hayley.
“I thought the whole point of this was to stop looters,” West said.
“Do you see any looters?” Baz said, looking up and down the street. “Then job well done. Seems like we deserve our just desserts.”
But the freezer was empty – and the store wasn’t. A scrawny guy with black glasses and hair gelled into the approximation of a miniature Mohawk emerged from the back room, shouting and threatening to call the police.
West knew him: Jason Green. Everyone knew him, just like everyone knew Bob and Jesse who ran the gourmet sandwich place and Popeye Pete who ran the tattoo parlor and Ellen Choi who served coffee at the luncheonette and taught knitting on the weekends and Farah and Kitty who’d been “roommates” for more than sixty years. What people guessed about Nick, they knew about Jason, who made sure they didn’t forget it. He was fearless. This year he’d tried to start a gay-straight alliance at the high school, but the only person who showed up to the meeting was an English teacher who’d been ordered to under penalty of firing.
Or so West had heard. He averted his eyes from people like Jason, for fear anyone might notice him noticing.
“I’ll do it!” Jason shouted. “I’ll call the cops!”
“Good luck,” Baz said. “Last time I checked, no phones. But if you do get through” – he tapped his badge proudly – “tell my dad Deputy Demming says hi.”
“You have to leave here. Now.”
“Why should we? You’re here.”
“This is my store!”
“Your dad’s store, you mean,” Matt said. “He even know you’re here?”
“He’s on his way,” Jason said. “And he’s been going around with his hunting rifle lately. Just so you know.”
“I don’t know, guys,” Emily said, “maybe we should go —”
“Not until we get something out of this,” Hayley snapped. “If there’s no ice cream, I want something better. I was promised an entertaining night, Baz. So far: not.”
Events were taking on a tinge of inevitability. And West did nothing to stop them.
But you could.
Just the wind, he told himself.
You could stop them all.
“Emily’s right, we should go,” Baz said, and Hayley looked wounded until she got a telltale wink. “All of us,” Baz added, and nodded to Matt, who grabbed Jason by the scruff of the neck and tossed him out the door. He landed on his knees, grunting with pain, and scrambled to his feet just in time for Matt to give him a sharp poke in the gut that knocked him back on his ass.
Hayley and Emily’s laughter had an animal sound to it, rising higher and higher until the night seemed to fill with their screams. Jason was silent. His accusing eyes fell not on his tormentors, but on West.
“Jeremiah,” he said. “Come on.”
West tensed, and didn’t allow himself to check on whether Baz was giving him a weird look, or furrowing his meathead brow in an effort to put the pieces together. More power to him if he could. West had no idea why this freak would call him by a name no one was supposed to use, or why he’d think that West, of all people, could be called upon for help.
Come on, Jeremiah.
He shook it off.
“I think you want to apologize for being so rude back there,” Baz said, standing over Jason and toeing his shoulder when it looked like he might be trying to rise. “Perhaps you’d like to reconsider. You could invite us in and offer the ladies some ice cream.”
“There is no ice cream, asshole.”
Bad idea. Baz, who was slim for a quarterback but still had at least fifty pounds on Jason, most of it muscle, grabbed his collar and yanked his head forward. “I must’ve heard you wrong. Want to try that again?”
“Jeremiah, please tell them to stop it.” Jason sounded neither desperate nor afraid. It was an oddly polite request, as if they were having the discussion over coffee and he simply wanted West to have his friends turn down their music.
West steeled himself. It would be over soon. Baz preferred intimidation and humiliation to actual violence, which he was smart enough to know could have actual repercussions. The girls would soon get bored or nervous or both, and they’d all leave the kid whimpering in the street and go off somewhere to get drunk or stoned or both.
Except that instead, Baz slammed Jason’s head against the concrete, hard.
And the girls laughed.
While Jason moaned and cradled his head, Matt kicked him in the stomach.
The girls laughed harder.
“Enough!” West said sharply. “You don’t even know this kid. What’s he done to you?”
“What’s he done?” Baz said, his foot casually resting on the kid’s chest. “Jason here used to have gym class same period as me. And I’m pretty sure I caught him looking at my dick. That right, Jason?” Baz dug in his heel. “You like to look at my dick?”
Jason shook his head.
“Word on the street is our friend Jason likes dick. What do you have to say about that, Jason?”
“Yeah, I like dick,” he said evenly. “But trust me, I wouldn’t touch your disease-rotten mini-peen for a million bucks, so you’re going to have to get one of these morons to jerk you off instead.”
West willed him to shut up. His flashlight caught Baz’s face, which had gone slack, his eyes as empty as any West had ever seen. He was suddenly sure that Baz was going to murder this kid, right here in the dark street, with all of them watching, Matt and the girls maybe cheering him on as Baz pounded Jason’s head into the cement again and again and again until the kid’s stoicism slipped and he screamed and then, not much longer after that, he stopped. West could already hear the sick sound of skull on blacktop; he could smell the blood.
West was bigger; Baz was crazier. He’d never given much thought to which mattered more in hand-to-hand combat. He didn’t have to think about whose side Matt would take, which meant two against one, and Matt was the size of a refrigerator.
Before he could decide what to do – decide whether to do – footsteps approached at a fast clip. Without a word, the girls took flight, willing enough to cheer on the bloodlust but not to get caught doing it. Baz hastily pulled his foot off Jason, who stumbled to his feet and scuttled away. He was gone by the time the owner of the footsteps emerged from the shadows.
Rosemary Wooden was unintimidating under normal circumstances – hunched to a
height of five feet, all ninety pounds of her swimming in a flowing caftan, fringes of white hair artfully arranged to poof over bald spots. In the dark of night, she looked like a kitten wandering blithely into a lion’s den. She smiled tightly at them, clutching her lacquered purse to her side.
“Warm night,” she said, limboed between friendly and un.
“They’re all warm this time of year, ma’am.” Baz offered a smarmy smile, betraying very little of the disappointment he must have felt in letting go of his prey. “Can we help you home?”
Rosemary looked at the darkened storefront, taking in the shattered window. Both arms now curled protectively around the purse. She shook her head. “Such strange times. I thought a walk might do me good.”
“Okay, so… have a great night.”
Baz waved her away, but she didn’t move.
West realized he’d tensed all his muscles. He reminded himself that Baz wouldn’t do anything stupid here. No eighty-year-old woman could come to harm on Main Street at the hands of a couple of varsity football players, even in the middle of the night, even on a night like this. Still, surely Rosemary Wooden hadn’t lived in Oleander this long without knowing when it was best to be on her way. Quickly.
Instead, she took a step closer to the football players, peering at them through thick lenses.
“I know you,” she said, not sounding pleased about it.
“Well, I am the Bulldog quarterback,” Baz preened.
“No, not you. You.” She was now close enough to poke Matt in the chest, which she did. Hard.
“Matt Crosby. I live down the street from you?”
“Yes, you do.” She pursed her lips. “I believe you and some of your friends festooned my front yard with several rolls of toilet paper last fall.”
“Oh, no, that wasn’t me, ma’am.”
Accurate, technically: it had been more of an us than a me. Half the team, high on winning and several fully tapped kegs, repaying an old lady for some slight from Matt’s childhood, some tongue-lashing he’d chosen that night to avenge.
“And the bag of feces on my doorstep? Not you, either, I take it?”
There had, West recalled, been many slights to avenge over the last season. Matt had a small brain, but a large capacity for grudges.
Matt shook his head. “Now, why would I do something like that?”
Walk away, West thought, gripped with the sudden certainty that something terrible was about to happen. Now. “Ma’am, I’m happy to walk you home – the long way, if you’d like.”
“I believe I’ve already said that I would not like.”
Her hands shifted around in her purse, and when she pulled one out, it was holding a tiny pearl-handled revolver. Before West had time to register that the sweet old lady was aiming a gun at them, it fired. There was a sharp report. And then, with equally little fanfare or fuss, Matt was on the ground, a neat hole in the middle of his forehead, his mouth open in familiar slack-jawed confusion, his sightless eyes popped wide.
Rosemary Wooden shook her head, chuckling. “Hmm, that was nice,” she said, as if satisfactorily confirming a theory. Then, to West and Baz, “Remember, good boys don’t give dog doody to their neighbors. You have a nice night now.”
“Will do, ma’am,” Baz said, and both boys stood there, looking neither at each other nor at Matt’s body lying between them until she slipped the gun into her purse and, like nothing had happened, primped her hair poof, turned on her practical heels, and walked away.
West dropped to his knees by the body. Matt was dead. Not moving. Not breathing. Heart – when he finally willed himself to lift a hand and feel for a pulse – not beating.
Dead. Just like that.
A strange calm had settled over him, a numb acceptance of the bloody scene that some part of him knew, with the same clinical disinterest, must be shock.
“So that was weird,” Baz said, his own nonchalance slicing through West’s stupor.
“Weird?”
“You don’t think so?”
“We’ve got to get him to a hospital” – it was too late for that – “or call the cops. Or something.”
“We pretty much are the cops.” Baz tapped his stupid badge. “And what do you think that bitch would tell people about us, if anyone asked? You think she’d say we’re just a few nice boys hanging out in the road in the middle of the night, knitting or something? You think anyone would buy that we weren’t about to do anything to her, and she just thought it’d be a nifty idea to…”
“Shoot him,” West said. “She shot him.”
“You noticed.”
“So what do you suggest we do?”
“Go home,” Baz said. “Forget this happened. Oh, and don’t leave dog doody on old ladies’ doorsteps. I’m going to remember that one.” Incredibly, he laughed.
West wanted to throw up. Or punch him. Or both.
More than anything, he did not want to leave Matt Crosby lying in the middle of the street with a hole in his head. How many corpses could one coward be expected to abandon?
“We can’t help him now,” Baz said. “And we didn’t do anything. There’s nothing to feel guilty about.”
“Nothing to feel anything about, is that right?”
“Bingo.”
West bent his head over Matt, feeling like he should say a prayer. Say something, no matter how little he’d liked the guy or how much he felt like running home and forgetting the entire night had ever happened. A quiet sorry was all he could manage, unsure what he was apologizing for.
When he looked up, Baz was already gone.
By the next morning, the corpse had been disposed of, and the street cleaned. West didn’t know what, if anything, Baz had told his father, but no questions were asked.
Every night, when it was safe, although it was never truly safe, Cass slipped out of the shed and searched for stars. For three nights, a thick, reddish cloud cover had blotted out the sky. But not tonight. Tonight, the clouds were gone, the moon was a sliver, and the night was alive with stars.
She couldn’t allow herself the sun. Even after a year in a windowless room, she couldn’t take the risk. She would settle for the stars.
Cass lay on her back in the dirt. Dew seeped through her thin cotton shirt. Weeds tickled her face. Wind stirred her hair. She sighed, deeply, breathing in the night, the smells of fresh-cut grass and damp bark, the whispers of bugs and birds, the bright canopy of sparkling lights.
This majestical roof fretted with golden fire. The words drifted back to her from a soliloquy she’d learned for her sophomore English class, in the time before.
All of this, an echo of before, when she could afford not to notice the infinite diversity of a world that was more than four featureless walls and a cracked ceiling. Even the shed, with its mildew and rust and spiders, was pure pleasure, simply for being new. She could entertain herself for hours probing its dark corners, tracing her fingers along the variety of textures, losing herself in the sharp, sloping curves of a rusting shovel or the intricate operations of an ant brigade on the march. She could lie here happily, in the weeds, listening to the night songs, counting the stars, and waiting for dawn.
These were pleasures she didn’t deserve; they were pleasures she couldn’t deny herself.
She lay shivering in the dew, willing time to stop, dreaming of other suns, until a small figure crept toward her, crouched beside her, and reminded her, “You shouldn’t be out here.”
“And you shouldn’t even be awake,” she said. Then, because she knew he was right, “Just a little longer.”
“That’s what I always say to Danny.” The kid laughed merrily. “It works, too. He’s such a sucker.”
Milo was a sucker, too, because they stayed outside. Just a little longer.
The first couple of times, the kid had snuck into the shed as if he were auditioning for a Bond film, tiptoeing with his collar up around his chin and his cap brim shadowing his baby fat cheeks. He’d hovered in the doorway, a
nd Cass had pressed herself up against the back wall, both of them afraid to get too close. The kid had chattered nervously while Cass tried to remember what it meant to have a conversation, to ask questions that were answered, to talk to someone who didn’t lock the door when they left you behind. Gradually she’d let herself get comfortable. So had he.
Four days had passed since she’d gotten lost in the storm and stumbled into the Ghents’ backyard; four days since she’d set up camp in the town she’d meant to leave behind. She’d spent every day hating herself for staying there even though she couldn’t trust herself around a child, didn’t know what she was capable of. But she couldn’t leave. Not yet. Not that the shed made for luxurious living quarters, with its bowing, mold-infested walls, its fertilizer stink, and the nest of spiders she was pretty sure lived beneath the folded tarp she’d used that first night as mattress, pillow, and sheet. Now she had the kid’s old sleeping bag, one of his father’s old pillows, and an eclectic collection of scrounged food – a bag of Doritos, a box of crackers, two useless cans of soup. It was dry, and relatively safe. He’d told her about the soldiers on the edge of town, and about the signs with her face on them. She would leave eventually – once the danger had passed. Find a way out of town and into another life.