Breaking Glass (41 page)

I suck in a breath and begin to shake. I want so badly to shut my computer and turn it off. But I can’t. I hug my arms close to my chest and force myself to listen.

The blackness gives way to Susannah, seated in front of the wrinkled white sheet, alive. So alive.

“I’m sorry for manipulating you, Jeremy. For using your love to get back at the ones who hurt me.”

“And most of all, I’m sorry for the nonsense about raising me from the dead. I hope you didn’t fall for that. When I kill myself, I mean to stay dead. I only threw that in so you’d really believe I was gone.”

She looks straight into the camera and says flatly. “I want you to find Mother’s book. I was going to use it and expose all those roots to the light…but, Jeremy, it wasn’t enough reason to live. I just wanted to end it. And to take them all with me.”

“I knew you wouldn’t rest if you’d thought someone had killed me. That you wouldn’t rest until you’d uncovered every last secret. I’m sorry.”

She looks down, hair falling like a curtain over her face. When she looks into the camera again, her eyes are shiny with tears. “I wish I could have loved you back, Jeremy. But my heart died a long time before I did.”

I turn off the computer and cover myself in blankets, waiting for the dark to claim me, for her to come so I can apologize for not getting it. For missing the gnawing emptiness behind the radiant smile.

But she never does.

E P I L O G U E

Now (April 7th)

Once the ground thawed enough, we chartered a boat and buried Susannah on her island, the island Celia Morgan bought from the state and had officially renamed “Pirate Island.”

With Spake’s help, Ryan shuffled up to the grave’s edge and tossed the silver Kabbalah pendant on top of the traditional Jewish oak coffin I insisted she be buried in.

“Ashes to a-a-ashes, d-dust t-to dust,” he said in his faltering stutter. And I began to shovel in the dirt that would fill her grave.

In his own way, I guess Ryan really had loved her, too.

Beside Susannah’s three-spired sculpture, we’d installed a simple headstone that read:

Here lies the Pirate Queen
.
At peace at last
.

But, sadly, I know that isn’t true.

Not yet, anyway.

Trudy Durban was declared unfit to stand trial. In jail, her weak hold on reality tore loose and she slipped completely into madness, her ravings about murders and devils ignored. Strangely, the day after her commitment to the psych ward, Trudy Durban’s house mysteriously burned to the ground, the evidence of Patrick Morgan’s crimes gone up in smoke along with the last traces of Trudy Durban’s sanity.

In the end, Patrick Morgan got to take his good name to the grave, his esteemed memory marked by a statue of his likeness erected by a grateful town.

What waits for him on the other side, who can say?

I’ll never know if Patrick Morgan really did drive my mother off the road or if she was driven to madness by her own personal demons.

I’m happy to let her rest in peace.

With the poisonous tree cut down, the roots are better left buried. Let some future historian dig them up.

For me, at least, the drowning dreams have stopped.

At my dad’s, Celia’s, and Marisa’s insistence, I’ve been attending Teen-Anon meetings three times a week.

And though there are times I would have cut off my other leg for a just a sip, I haven’t had a single drop of alcohol in four months.

Often, I walk down to the reservoir and gaze at Pirate Island. On clear nights, when the moon is blazing over the water, I think I see her waiting by the shoreline, her dress rustling in the breeze, and my stomach twists in knots.

I don’t think she expected me to bring her back. She thought it was a joke. What I summoned from beyond the grave was just the angry, hurt part.

I prefer to remember the girl from my art class with the magical smile.

But before I can do that, I have to set the sad, desolate echo of Susannah free.

It’s a mild day for early April. There’s a small crowd gathered at the Riverton High track. I spot Lyle Hoffman, but he’s not looking at me. He’s staring at Ralph, my new running blade, a deranged smile twitching under his mustache.

I give Ralph a test bounce. The stump balks a little. It’s used to snuggling up to Veronica. But change is good.

Ralph is pretty weird, though. He’s a lot like Veronica at the top, but after the knee joint he curves into a wicked black piece of metal, like a bent helicopter blade.

I spot Ryan walking slowly, without a cane or walker, clutching Spake’s arm, an orange ski cap perched on his head. He’s still a bit too unsteady to walk on his own, but he’s getting there. The mirrored glasses are Spake’s touch to hide his “googly eyes,” as Ryan calls them. He still gets headaches from eyestrain, and his speech is a little slurred and halting, but that doesn’t dim his smile.

Marisa jumps up and down next to Celia and my Dad. She’s landed a full scholarship to Columbia and plans to study medicine. We worry about how it will be for us when we go our separate ways in the fall, her to Columbia and me to Duke.

It was Marisa who convinced me to write the essay that won me the full track scholarship to Duke University, the first ever granted to a disabled applicant at that school. It documented in gruesome detail the ordeal of losing my leg—minus the drugs, alcohol, and sexually abusive ghosts, of course—and argued the point that, even with one leg, I can run faster than most candidates with two.

I’m here, today, to prove my point.

There’s also a horde of TV crews and news reporters. I’ve gotten kind of used to them following me around. After all, I’m the one-legged miracle boy who solved the mystery of Susannah Durban’s disappearance.

I take off running. The wind whispers through my hair like a hundred kisses. My stride is uneven at first, the hard thud of one sneaker against pavement alternating with the springy bounce I can only feel in my thigh and pelvis. But I run, laughing, my speed increasing, the steady thump of my heart against my ribcage like the beat of a ceremonial drum.

I’m back.

And life is good.

Later that day, the setting sun stains the sky a brilliant vermillion. Marisa and I climb the rocks to the water’s edge. Veronica still doesn’t like the uneven terrain, but with Marisa to steady me we make it to the shore. I set down the knapsack I’ve loaded up with artifacts, things I might once have added to my collection.