Be Not Afraid (8 page)

“Mom, Dad, this is Marin.”

“You’re Marin?” Mrs. Jackson spoke first, looking me
up and down with a sweep of her eyes. She was expensively dressed: a yellow silk blouse, close-fitting black pants cinched with a leather belt, high black heels. She had beautiful auburn hair, which had been twisted up and anchored in the back, and her ears were adorned with large pearl studs.

“Yes. Nice to meet you.” I tried not to stare at the orange ball beneath her blouse, which appeared to be moving up and down inside her stomach. I’d seen one like this before in a student at school, but it was nowhere near as big. This one was enormous, and the center was almost brown, as if it was starting to rot from the inside out. I was pretty sure it was an ulcer.

“You as well.” Mrs. Jackson shook my hand stiffly. “Are you a new friend of Cassandra’s? I don’t know if I’ve ever heard your name before.”

“Not really.” I shook my head. “I mean, we know each other from school. A little.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Jackson looked even more puzzled.

“Thank you so much for coming.” Mr. Jackson stepped forward, his hand extended. “It means a lot.” I shook it, marveling at the enormity of his fingers, the width of his palm. Like his wife, Mr. Jackson was dressed well—navy blue pants, a white-and-blue-checkered dress shirt, and jacket. He looked like Dominic but older, with gray hair around his ears and deep lines in his cheeks. Handsome to a fault. “Ever since we got here, all she’s been saying is that she wants to talk to you.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Jackson tilted her head to one side. “What in the world is all that about?”

“I don’t know.” I glanced away from the orange ball in her stomach. “I really don’t.”

“Well, maybe it’s just part of everything else that no one seems able to make sense of today.” She crossed her thin arms over her chest and gazed around the room. “Although, they are ninety-nine percent sure it’s epilepsy, what she has. And that she had a grand mal seizure today. So that’s something at least. A diagnosis. And it’s an entirely treatable condition, too, thank God. With the right medication, she’s going to be just fine.” She pressed the fingers of one hand against her breastbone and winced. “They’re saying she might even be able to go home tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Dominic repeated. “Really?”

“That’s what they’re saying,” Mrs. Jackson replied. “There’s no reason to keep her in a mental hospital if she has epilepsy. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know, but—”

“I don’t want her here.” Mrs. Jackson caught herself, glancing at her husband. “We don’t want her here. She doesn’t belong in a place like this. I’d rather have a nurse come to the house and help me take care of her there.” She nodded once, the discussion finished.

A pregnant pause filled the room. I bit my lip, stared down at my shoes.

“They just gave her a little something to calm her down.” Mr. Jackson gestured toward a closed door behind
him. “She’s in there resting now. I think it might be a good time, if you want to go in.”

I could feel something sour pooling in the back of my throat as I looked at the door.

“You want me to go in with you?” Dominic asked.

Yes.
I hesitated. “No. It’ll be all right.” I tried to smile. “I’ll yell if I need you.”

“Yell?” Mrs. Jackson inquired. “Why would you need to yell?”

Dominic and I exchanged a look. “She won’t,” he said. “Go ahead, Marin. Take your time.”

The room was tinier than I expected, smaller even than my bedroom at home, with tan padded walls, a dark-green-carpeted floor, and a panel with three different colored buttons close to the door. Cassie was in the middle of the room, stretched flat on her back in a hospital bed. Both her eyes were closed and white blankets had been pulled up to her waist and then folded over again. A single pillow beneath her head looked as if it had just been fluffed, and someone had combed her long blond hair. Heavy straps secured both of her wrists, and her hands were positioned carefully on either side of her, as if someone had arranged them after she had gone to sleep.

Her body told a different story. The purple orb inside her tongue had gotten darker. Beneath the lower half of her bare arms, I could see little blue and pink glimmers under the skin, darting this way and that way, like bright fish.
And on the right side of her face, beneath the soft gauze taped to her cheek, was a deep, cavernous carving of the number eight. I stared at it for a moment, repulsed and horrified at the same time; the damaged nerves and severed vessels quivered with pink ribbons of pain, and the edges of it dripped blue.

Would that be the worst of it? I flicked my eyes over her face, scanned the top of her head. I dropped them lower beneath her eyes and then over the top of her head one more time, just in case, but there was no sign of anything else. No dark suggestion of what I thought I’d seen before.

Okay.

Deep breath.

Okay, then.

I walked closer to the bed and rested my hands on the metal railings. “Cassie?” My voice was a whisper.

Beneath the lids, I could see her eyeballs moving, first to one side, and then to the other. She blinked once and again and then stared up at the ceiling.

“Cassie.” I said her name again, a little louder.

She turned her head, looked at me, her eyes coming into focus. “Marin?” Her voice was hoarse; her lips quivered.

I nodded.

She tried to sit up, but the restraints around her wrists made it impossible. She yanked on them, an impatient grunt coming out of her mouth.

“No, no, don’t.” I reached out and touched one of them. “Just stay still.” I paused as she searched my face, looking for something. Her gaze felt like an insect of some kind, crawling over my skin, getting ready to burrow under the topmost layer. “Your brother came to get me.” I swallowed. “He said you wanted to see me? To talk to me?”

She nodded, her eyes glued to my face. “My head,” she whispered. “I think it’s in my head.”

I stared at her, confused. “What’s in your head?”

There was a long pause, as if she was trying to retrieve the answer from somewhere very far away. “She is,” she said finally. “Don’t you remember?”

Her answer made me take a step back, as if she had swung at me.

Cassie blinked at the movement, raised her head an inch or so off the pillow. “Marin? You remember, don’t you?”

I took another step back as a small moan drifted out between her lips, and then another, until I was within arm’s reach of the door.

“It hurts.” She turned her eyes away from me, moving her head from side to side. “Oh my God, it hurts so much, Marin. You have no idea.”

“It’s ’cause you’re sick,” I said. “You had a seizure at school this morning, and you hit your head on the floor. The doctors think you have epilepsy. But there’s medicine you can take, and—”

I stopped talking as Cassie’s hands curled into balls and then released. For a moment they seemed to freeze just
above the metal frame of her bed, and then they curled up again. Her knuckles bulged beneath the skin, knobs of bone smooth as shells, and then her fingers relaxed once more. Slowly, she began to scratch the sides of the bed.
Scritch scritch scritch.
She dragged them across the thin metal, her nails making a low, rasping sound. The veins on the backs of her hands stood out as she scraped harder, and the edges of her nostrils turned white. The movements became more frenetic the harder she clawed, as if she were trying to flay a layer of skin with the top of the metal bar. A fingernail split and then broke, followed by another one on the other hand, but she didn’t seem to notice, did not even break her stride. The back of my throat tightened. Was this the beginning of another fit? Should I call for help? The horrific scraping sound continued, but now as I watched, the tips of her fingers began to turn a strange gray color. The color deepened and swelled, the gray morphing into a faded purple and then a violet, until, impossibly, all ten of her fingers were black. I squinted, as if my eyes were playing tricks on me. But these were not pain shapes inside her fingers. It was as though ink had leaked through her skin, staining her fingertips from the inside out. They looked dead, lifeless, as if she had suddenly gotten gangrene.

By now, I had flattened myself against the door. My hands were over my ears, in a desperate attempt to block out the horrifying scraping sound. Without warning, Cassie turned her head and stared at me with the same awful intensity that she had in the auditorium, pleading, furious,
demanding. The movement made me jump so spastically that my sunglasses fell to the floor, but I made no move to pick them up. Instead, I glimpsed the sudden swish of black again, a ribbon caressing the inner hollows of her head, slipping in among the wide space behind her eyes like a dark, fluid stream of water. There was no room for hesitation this time, no possibility of doubt. The blackness was as real as anything I’d ever seen; it moved slowly, deliberately through her head, as if on display this time, wanting to be seen.

I opened my mouth to scream for Dominic, but nothing came out. It was like something clutched at my vocal cords, was squeezing them into paralysis. My hand scrabbled for the doorknob behind me, even as I felt my legs giving way.

Cassie struggled to sit up. Her long hair fell around the front of her shoulders, and a vein bulged along the side of her neck as she wrenched at the restraints around her wrists. A horrible tearing sound came from one of them as the Velcro began to give, but they stayed. Impossibly, they stayed.

I became aware of a faint rattling sound. It was coming from my teeth, which had started chattering, clicking against each other like some kind of windup toy. Cassie strained against the cuffs again, leaning forward, grunting with increased deliberation. Her dead fingertips curled at the tips like black hooks, and the inky stream inside her head continued to flow in an endless, steady current.

Runrunrun!
my brain commanded.
Runrunrun!
But I could not make myself move. It was as if the blackness inside her head had somehow riveted me to the floor, some weird energy putting nails in my feet, stakes in my legs. The color was so dark that I could not see her pupils anymore—they had been swallowed into a mass of tar. Finally, I pounded on the door behind me with the sides of my fists, kicked at it with my heels.

“Let me out!” My voice choked over the words. “Let me out!”

I could hear the sound of someone pressed up behind it, the knob rattling in its slot. “Marin!” It was Dominic. “Marin, get away from the door!” Without taking my eyes off Cassie, I moved myself to the right. The door flew open, throwing me to the floor, and the attendant with the black shoes rushed in, followed by Dominic and Mr. and Mrs. Jackson. The attendant lunged for Cassie, grabbing at her flailing arms, his face tight with exertion, and shoved her back down against the bed.

Cassie threw her head back and shrieked as he leaned over her, pinning her to the mattress with the weight of his body, and secured the loosened straps back around her arms.

“Don’t hurt her!” Mrs. Jackson screamed. “Don’t you hurt her! She’s sick!”

Dominic got down on one knee and helped me up. “Marin. Are you all right?”

I was about to answer him when I heard a sob. It was coming from behind the attendant, who was standing up straight again, securing Cassie’s leg straps around her ankles; it was mingled with words, a plea of some kind, with my name in it. “Marin. Oh God, Marin, help me. Please.”

I moved out from behind Dominic. Cassie’s hands were stretched inside the wrist straps, straining toward me. Her fingertips were white again, and she was weeping, her face freezing in horror and then giving way, over and over. There was no sign of the gangrene in her fingers, none of the serpentine blackness in her head. Both of them had vanished. She stared straight at me now with watery eyes, the ocean after a storm.

“Please.” She began to lower her arms, as if exhausted. Her voice followed, just as weary. “Please help me, Marin. Please.”

“What happened?” Mrs. Jackson’s voice was like a razor blade going through paper. “What’s going on? Will somebody please get the
doctor
?”

“Marin.” Dominic’s head whipped back and forth like a metronome, staring first at Cassie and then back at me. “Marin, what just happened? Talk to me.”

But I was not going to talk to him. I was not going to talk to anyone. I knew that if I didn’t get out of this space, away from whatever was in this room right this minute, this second, everything inside me was going to disintegrate. And I wasn’t talking about passing out the way I
sometimes felt I might do in school when the colors got too overwhelming.

I was talking about disappearing. For good.

With a surge of adrenaline, I pushed past Dominic and Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, almost knocking them over.

And then I ran like hell.

Air. I needed air. I needed to breathe. Oxygen. In and out of my lungs, as fast as possible, so that it could fill everything inside that had been touched by whatever I’d just seen back there, and then erase it. I ran harder than I had ever run before, forgetting about my bike in the back of Dominic’s Jeep, weaving in and around stop signs, trees, bushes, garbage cans with a terrified agility I didn’t know I possessed.

“Marin, wait!” The sound of Dominic’s voice filled me with fresh panic. He wasn’t far behind. And he could outrun me. I had to lose him. “Marin! Please!” I darted off the sidewalk and into the empty street. For a moment, all I could hear was the slap of my sneakers against the asphalt, the pull and release of my staggered breathing, and the faint pounding of Dominic’s footsteps, which were getting closer with every second. I swerved back onto the sidewalk as a
car veered toward me, beeping frantically. Darting through someone’s back lawn and into an alley, I hot-stepped through a maze of puddles, trying not to get my feet wet, and yelped when I did. No matter. The narrow brick buildings loomed up like castle walls on either side of me, and an opening beckoned at the end of the alley. There were no sounds behind me anymore; Dominic’s racing steps and measured breathing had vanished into the night.