After Obsession (23 page)

“I’m here, Alan.”

It’s Aimee’s voice, but she isn’t here. Not here in the dark place. She’s back in Courtney’s bedroom.

She’s put her healing hands on my body, adding her strength to mine.

“Great Spirit! I bring you this dark thing that you made for reasons I can’t know,” I yell into the darkness. “If it is your will, take it away from me and my family and friends and never let it bother this place again.”

And there, finally, standing before me with her beautiful glowing eyes, is Onawa, my spirit guide. Her cougar mouth is smiling at me.

You have done well, Spirit Warrior
, she says.
Give him to me
. She opens her mouth, and it’s like her head splits apart. Between her teeth is only light, a light so bright it should be blinding, but somehow it isn’t.

I reach forward. The River Man is still in my fist, but he’s fighting, squirming and screaming and cursing and trying to make promises he can’t keep. I push my fist between Onawa’s long, sharp teeth, into her throat as far as I can reach, until my shoulder is pressed against her muzzle.

Inside her body I can see the River Man, a thing of writhing shadow, expanding around my arm, confined within Onawa. He glares at me, spitting and cursing, and then I release him and pull my arm free. Onawa closes her mouth.

The Great Spirit is pleased with you
,
but now the dark spirits will plague you until you go to join your ancestors.

“Who are my ancestors?” I ask. “Who is my father?”

There will come a time for that answer, Spirit Warrior. For now, know that it is not a man’s ancestors who define who the man is. It is what he does for himself.

I’m so tired. I feel so weak.

Onawa is still talking.
Every man has a destiny, Spirit Warrior—but each man must decide if he will accept it.

I feel like I’m falling. I reach forward and my hand finds Onawa’s head. I lean against her. Sag against her, really.

Your body is near death. The dark one’s poison was very deep.

“I’m dying?”

Look behind me.

I somehow find the strength to raise my head. I see a light, like the mouth of a tunnel, behind Onawa. “What is it?” I ask.

The next world. It is where spirits go when the flesh dies.

When the flesh … dies?

We move slowly toward the light.

•
25
•

AIMEE

All my life I’ve wanted to save people, to be a hero kind of person. All my life I’ve wished that I could’ve stopped my mom from going out to that river, that I could’ve kept her alive.

But I failed.

The moment I step back into the bedroom and smell the decay, I realize I’ve failed again. I never should have left him alone to fight. I never should have tried to find gauze to take care of my arm.

“Alan!” I yell his name like that will help, like it is magic or a prayer.

But his name is just a name, and my yelling it doesn’t keep him from being collapsed on the bed with the thing that’s taken over Courtney. His hand is beneath her back. His other arm is thrown sideways, parallel to her leg. He’s breathing, but only just. His mouth twitches. He’s fighting him. He’s fighting the River Man somehow.

I run to him, to them. The entire house shakes. The floor seems to buck. The walls sway. He’s trying to make it fall on us, I think. He’s trying to ruin it all.

When I get to the bed, Court’s eyes flash open. It is not Court inside them. It’s something wicked. It is something that is so evil it could never understand the light.

Court’s mouth moves and says one word: “Mine.”

Anger surges inside me. “Oh, no way, baby. Not on my watch.”

It almost makes me laugh.
Not on my watch.

I lunge forward, placing my hands on Alan’s broad back. He doesn’t move. Something in the hallway crashes to the floor. The studs in the walls creak.

“Alan.” I say his name, trying to make it into something magic. But that’s not how it works. The something magic is in me. I am so tired, but I will myself to focus. My hands tingle with power. It’s the power of light. I whisper the words, “I’m here, Alan.”

He doesn’t move.

I push the panic away. I force the pain away. Pieces of door are slamming toward us again, whirling around us. One strikes Alan in the shoulder. One hits me in the leg. I keep focused. The light surges. My hands shake with it. It’s draining me, draining everything from me, and I don’t care. I just want Alan back. I don’t want to fail again. Something shifts in the room. Courtney’s eyes soften, fluttering closed as if she’s exhausted. It still smells rank—like feces and death, but something is gone. Alan stops moving.

He’s gone.

I turn him over, check for a heartbeat. Nothing. No pulse. His chest isn’t moving.

“Aim?” Court’s voice comes from the bed, weak and scared.

“I’m here, Court,” I say. I put both hands on Alan’s chest. “Stay with me. Please, please, stay with me.”

I shove all the power I have toward him. Hopefully it isn’t too late. He can’t die. He can’t. He can’t die.

Every single cell of me pushes light to him, begging God that he doesn’t die.

“Please,” I plead. “Please …”

There’s nothing. He doesn’t move. The lump in my throat widens so that I can’t swallow. I refuse to look away. I grab his head. My fingers lace into his hair and I whisper his name.

He gasps and opens his eyes. They are his eyes, just his, nobody else’s. Blinking hard, he smiles.

“Aimee?” he whispers. He grabs my hair like he’s making sure I’m real.

I smile. I’m so weak from saving him that it’s hard for me to not fall on top of him, but I don’t. My hands are shaking as they move to his face.

“You came back?” I ask, matching his whisper with my own.

“For you.” He wets his lips. His voice is hoarse, like he’s been yelling. “For you.”

I lean down. Our lips touch and it is sweet, so sweet.

Courtney croaks in a kind of laryngitis-style voice, “Guys. Could you stop making out and untie me because … you know … it’s a little on the weird side of kinky, the whole tied-up thing. And … I …?”

I laugh and pull away from Alan. I’m tired from bringing Alan back, but just seeing Courtney there rejuvenates me a little. Her face is clear. Her hair’s a total mess, but her eyes are Courtney eyes, kind, a little sarcastic, but good.

“Oh,” I say, and start working at the knots on her hands. My arm hurts from the movement, but I don’t care. “Oh, Court, you’re so beautiful.”

“Beautiful?” She shakes her head. I free one hand and start working on the other. “Think we should take a pic?”

“And put you in for prom queen?” I get the other hand free and help her sit up. “Yes.”

Alan struggles to sit up, too.

“You,” I order. “Stay there. You just died.”

Court had been working on her foot bindings, but her fingers stop. “Alan died? You died?” Her quivering hand covers her mouth.

Alan nods slowly. The deep, distant gaze of his eyes leaves her face and focuses on me. “Aimee saved me.”

That’s when it hits me. I did. I saved him. Me.

We are all too messed up and tired to clean anything more than our wounds. We sort of stumble down the stairs and sit together on the couch. I take the middle. Alan’s arm rests around my shoulders, but it’s almost a dead weight. He’s so tired. Court and I are in pretty much the same boat.

We sit there and stare at the TV. It’s not even on, but we stare at the black, blank screen like it’s some fascinating blockbuster epic.

“We should clean upstairs,” Alan says. He runs his free hand across his eyes. “Your mom will go insane when she sees it. My mom, too.”

“Clean?” Court snorts. She rests her head against my shoulder. “There are claw marks in the walls. My bed is kindling. I don’t suppose either of you can magically poof it all back to normal.”

I wiggle my fingers. “No special poof powers.”

She groans. “Some kind of healer you are.”

We sit.

“Do you think we’re in shock?” I finally ask.

Alan nods.

We sit some more.

“Do you think he’s really gone?” Court shudders. “Is he gone for good?”

We both wait for Alan to answer. He hauls in a deep breath. His entire chest moves with it. “He’s gone.”

“And you know this for a fact?” Court prods.

“I know it,” he insists.

Our eyes meet. There’s so much pain in there, but there’s strength, too.

“I’m so sorry.” Court’s voice is a half sob. “I’m so sorry. I just wanted my dad, you know. I wanted him back so bad. I just wanted …”

I wrap my arms around her. She crumples into them and cries.

The house is so silent, except for the sound of regret and of mourning and of pain and loss, and that’s the way it is supposed to be. Alan leans toward us and wraps his arms around both of us. For a second I imagine my mom smiling at me. Alan and I did what she couldn’t do. We protected us.

“It’s okay,” I whisper into Court’s hair. “It’s all okay now. It’s okay.”

After a minute Court lifts her head. She sniffs and rubs at her nose. “What happened with that stupid Cheeto? Did they sell it yet?”

I wipe the tears off her cheeks. “The bidding’s up to $1,200.”

“You’re not serious,” Alan says.

“Man.” Court flops back against the armrest. “This world is so freaking weird.”

•
26
•

ALAN

“You really have changed.” Mom reaches over and touches my hair when she says it. This is unusual for Mom; she’s not much of a toucher, really. But since she came home that day and found the three of us sitting on Aunt Lisa’s couch, things have been a little strange. Not that they weren’t strange before.

The hair Mom touches is gray. I am a seventeen-year-old half-Navajo boy with streaks of gray hair at both temples. I guess that comes from traveling in the Spirit World. From dying and coming back.

“We all change, Mom,” I tell her. “It’s part of life.”

“Says the boy who fought so hard to stay in Oklahoma,” she teases as her hand drops to her side. Her hands slide around and she hooks her thumbs in her back pockets; a strange look comes over her face. “I’m sorry I dragged you away from home.”

“Like Metallica says, ‘Anywhere I roam, where I lay my head is home.’ ” I grin, and she shakes her head. “There’s also that other saying, you know.” I look through the open front door to where Aimee and Benji are cleaning paintbrushes in the yard.

“What saying is that?” Mom asks.

“Home is where the heart is.”

She laughs at me then. “We only had to travel halfway across the country to find a girl good enough for my boy.”

“I think there were other reasons,” I say. “But Aimee is a definite perk.”

“Talking in riddles again?”

I smile at her, but I know it’s kind of a sad smile. “It’s the new me.”

It’s Sunday afternoon, more than two weeks after the battle with the River Man. A lot has changed. I went to my first New England funeral, for Chris Paquette, and I’d be happy never to go to another one again.

Blake was picked up on U.S. Highway 1 about ten miles north of town the day after the battle with the River Man. An older couple on their way to the coast saw him stumble out of the woods and collapse beside the highway. They brought him into town and left him at the hospital, where he was treated for hypothermia and questioned by the police. Blake didn’t know anything about Chris’s death. The news was pretty hard on him. After our fight, he’d gone home, he said. That’s the last thing he remembers until he woke up facedown in the woods beside the river.

“It was like a shadow had been sucked out of my head,” he’d said in a newspaper article printed a couple of days after he was found.

Today, the house is full of the smell of fresh paint. The upstairs hallway has new Sheetrock, put in yesterday, and today it is painted, all with the help of Aimee and her menfolk. Courtney has new furniture, though most of it came from a secondhand store in Bangor. She calls it retro-chic, and I honestly don’t know if she’s trying to make the best of sleeping on a used bed or if she really thinks it’s cool.

Gramps and Mr. Avery come down the steps. Gramps is grinning at me. “Women love a gray-haired man,” he jokes, running a hand over his own head.

I laugh. “Thanks again for all your help,” I say.

“I don’t mind,” Gramps says. “But you know Benji’s price.”

“I know.” I grin and look back out the door. Benji and Courtney are using the brushes to throw water at each other now. The sky is overcast and the TV weatherman says it’ll snow tonight. “Dinner and a movie with me and Aimee. And a new football.”

“He’ll expect some kissing on the date,” Gramps says. “That way he can tell on her. And you have to teach him how to throw the football like Tom Brady.”

“Well, if I must,” I agree. “I suppose that’s a pretty good trade for the $1,567.43 you guys got for a Cheeto with boobs.”

Yes, that’s how much they got for the Marilyn Monroe Cheeto. It was Benji’s idea to give the money to Aunt Lisa to help pay for fixing her house.

Benji may be the only one besides me, Aimee, and Courtney who truly believed our story about what happened in Aunt Lisa’s house that day. Maybe Gramps does; he’s hard to read. But nobody really argued with us, either, so maybe I’m just not giving them enough credit. Maybe they sense a change in the house. In the town. Maybe they’re just glad the dreams are gone and Courtney is back to normal.

Gramps and Mr. Avery move away, going outside. Aunt Lisa walks out of Courtney’s room upstairs and smiles at me as she comes down. A stair above me, she’s my height. She stops there and puts her arms around my shoulders.

“Thank you,” she whispers into my ear. Maybe she
does
believe. She leaves me and goes outside with the others.

It’s just me and Mom, alone in the house, watching everyone else outside. Mom comes over, pulling a folded paper out of her back pocket. Even before she hands it over to me I see the University of Oklahoma logo on it. “This came for you yesterday,” she says. “You were busy, and …” She sighs. “It’s from the athletic director’s office.”

“Oh.” I unfold the cream-colored sealed envelope. There’s a stamp from where it was forwarded from our old Oklahoma City address. I look at the red OU logo in the return address corner. I don’t open it. I just look at it.

“Alan?”

“Yeah, Mom?” Her eyes are watering a little. “What’s wrong?”

“You look just like your father,” she says.

I put my arm around her and hug her so tight her back pops. I release her just a little as I say, “I know, Mom. Sometimes Fate puts us right where we need to be, and we don’t realize it until later.”

She hugs me back, then steps away. Now the tears are running down her cheeks, but she’s smiling.

She says it again. “You really have changed.”