Coping (3 page)

While Gabe’s in the shower crooning
out the Proclaimers’
I’m Gonna Be
, I unlatch
the door to the small cage I keep in the corner near my bed and snatch out a
squirming, furry body with my ungloved left hand.

The rat squeals with protest. I
close my eyes and let up, just a little, on my control. I feel the skin on my
palm shiver and peel back in an X pattern. From the chamber beneath, a
vein-covered feeding bulb rises up. It’s all instinct. All clamoring need. The
feeding bulb latches to the rat’s aura, and for a few precious seconds I drift
away on mighty tides of music. Gabe’s voice, the hiss of the shower, the rattle
of pipes within the walls, the wind pressing its face against the window—all
the sounds and colors of the outside world fade away beneath the boom and cry
of my hunger.

It ends so quickly—that small drip
of honey all gone—and I am racked with the need for more. My hands throb with
heat, blood sloshes in my ears, my spine gets all prickly, and the monster in
my mind whispers golden promises if I just let her out for a moment.

I clasp the dead furry body in my
hand and wait for the worst to pass.

This is how it goes with me. Every
time.

When Gabe gets out of the shower, I
have pulled myself into decent shape. Luckily, I am never required to carry the
conversation. Instead, Gabe proudly shows me the new dating website he’s
building. When the site is done, he’ll put ads along the side, which,
apparently, people will click on. Each click is a few pennies into Gabe’s
PayPal account. It adds up, or so he says, which is how he makes money for bullets,
guns and all the cans of Monster Energy drinks he sucks down. As far as I know,
Tarren hasn’t been able to monetize scowling, so I think Gabe is the only one
bringing in money.

Gabe’s scheme is actually pretty
impressive, and when I tell him so, Gabe’s aura lights up with happy green
hues. Those eyes of his—a whole lot of warm brown filled with tiny flecks of
gold—rest so easy on my face. There’s no suspicion. No doubt. No fear.

And he talks to me, whispering
through the dark when we both lie down in our separate beds. Gabe tells me
about his life, the history of his family, which was actually my family all
along, though I was never a part of it. Slowly, I am stitching together a
living, colorful tapestry of them. Learning about my mother, Diana, that great
towering enigma, and about Tammy, the phantom sister who seems always hovering
behind Tarren’s blackest, most unforgiving scowls.

It’s overwhelming to me, learning
about this family that was never mine, but I don’t tell this to Gabe. I let him
talk. It eases him. When he falls asleep—his aura releasing all its other
colors and returning to a singular brilliant, azure blue—I lie in my bed and
stare holes into the ceiling. The song gets worse at night, when Gabe’s
constant chatter is not here to distract me.

I go ahead and put myself through
the paces of my nightly breakdown routine. It starts with Ryan. Just vanilla at
first. Then I feel his moist kisses on my chest. His cold toes running down my
shins. Then more of him. His face. That curmudgeon mouth that I worked so hard
to move. The long, slim lines of his body merging with mine. His grumbly
stomach. That zen-like expression of tolerance he would adopt when I went into
one of my dramatic rants about something that wasn’t actually important at all.

The emotions that I bottle up
during the day leech out of my brain, and I let them swirl and grow powerful.
The sadness is a wide open ache with no edges, no convenient ladder to pull
myself up from. Still photos of my childhood sprinkle down across my vision like
snowflakes.  My adoptive parents Karen and Henry handing me Christmas
presents.  My friends. My house. My favorite pair of jeans.

The tears spring out of my eyes,
and my chest starts to heave, but I can keep it quiet, a tempest on the inside
with only these streaking tears and muffled little moans on the outside. Next
comes the scene of Ryan’s death. Our casual, off balance kiss, my hand in his
back pocket. Then the dark shadow of Grand in our path. The images flicker and
turn black, and it’s mostly just emotions. The loss. The anguish. The fear.

And now I’ve come to the final
stage of my self-immolation routine. Grand. The pit of sadness inside me fills
with something hot and acid. I watch Grand drain Ryan with a touch. I feel each
of the two needles he plunges into my spine and the fire they bring. The fire
that changed me into this thing I am now.  My emotions churn, twisting from
sadness to rage, from pain to hate. The tears are still coming, but they are
something else entirely now.

I feel the shift in Gabe’s energy
and quickly turn on my side. I hold my breath, swallowing my huffs and little
gasps. But it’s too late.

“It’s only been a month Maya.” His
voice is raspy with sleep. “It’s okay to be…”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yeah, bottling everything up. That
can’t possibly backfire.”

I clutch the lumpy pillow between
my arms. “Go back to sleep.”

Gabe sighs. I hear his body
shifting on the spring mattress. “God forbid you actually open up. Let me
help.”

I don’t answer, and he doesn’t
push. The darkness beats around us. I wait for Gabe to fall asleep again, but
he lies awake and still for the next hour. I wonder what thoughts are plaguing
his mind, but I’m not about to ask.

When sleep does claim him again, I
wait until he’s down deep, and then I slip out of bed. For no reason I can
ascertain, I find his coat on the floor—the one I wore this afternoon—and pull
out the folded missing person flyer of Sunshine Bailey. It’s the middle of the
night, but I suddenly want to know all about this dead girl.

Creepy, thy name is Maya.

Sunshine has a round, plain face
surrounded by cropped, curly hair. Her eyes are dark and pretty. The more I
stare at the picture, the more I’m convinced that she was a good person. Her
face seems open and honest to me, that smile full of plain o’ happiness. I turn
on my laptop, hitch a ride on the motel’s free WiFi and look up Sunshine. Her
Facebook page is open to the public and has become a living memorial. Like
Ryan’s. Like mine.

Here are more pictures of her.
Sunshine had a curvy body and a pretty bland sense of fashion, but I was right
about her being a good person. She had over three hundred friends and was some
sort of teacher for handicapped kids. I read through the wall of comments.
People miss her. They tell cute stories about nice things she did—there are
lots of these. They talk about how she touched their lives in deep and
meaningful ways, especially the parents of her students. Ironically, they even
call her an angel.

I am an emotional parasite, letting
the pain wash over me, stoking the fires of my misery with this wonderful fuel.
I do this with Ryan’s Facebook page too. Even my own. Always in these darkest
hours of the night. The pain and sadness are soothing. Like a familiar embrace.

Yeah, I’m totally adjusting to everything
just fine and dandy.

I scroll through her pictures—she
smiles a lot, Sunshine does—and stop at an image of her standing next to a
tall, thin guy. Sunshine is bundled in a thick red coat. The guy—though his
face is so young he might be still lingering in his last teenage years—wears a
black pea coat and holds an umbrella over them. He has a mess of sandy blonde
hair on his head, sleepy eyes and a trimmed goatee trailing down his long chin.

It’s the boy who chased me in the
woods; the boy I fell in love with for a split second. I stare at his face,
those casual, droopy eyes. The caption below reads, “Sunshine and Rain.” I
don’t get it. Is his name Rain, or is it just because she’s in the rain?
Sunshine seems much older than him, but they both have the same eyes and button
noses. Siblings. Their parents must have been smoking some potent hash when
they came up with those names.

Curious, I flip through Sunshine’s
other pics. Most of her pictures are of the children she taught. Seems like
they went on lots of fieldtrips. She always wears that same red coat. No
makeup. Same hairstyle at differing lengths. I find a few more of the boy. Most
of them aren’t good. He’s far away or blurry or a tall head in a crowd of
people at a barbeque. Always seeming to be in the background or turned away
from wherever the camera is.

The best one of him was the first I
saw. I flip back to it and remember his surprised expression when he caught me
standing over the body of the preacher. He probably thought I’d killed the guy.
Maybe his sister, too.

I look at his face in the picture,
at the umbrella he holds aloft above himself and Sunshine. I wonder if he is
lying awake somewhere here in Redmond missing his sister, hating me with all
his heart and vowing a nasty revenge.

I touch the screen just over his
chest.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

I shut down the laptop and sneak
out of the room without waking Gabe. The night is warm and filled with the
chirp of crickets. I walk three doors down, past strange new auras and the
sound of someone whispering nasty come-ons into a phone. I reach Tarren’s door
and listen. He’s awake, but still. There’s a lamp on. His energy churns
fitfully, which I take to mean nightmares again. He’s probably decided to give
up on sleep for the night.

I knock softly. He takes his time
coming to the door, and when he cracks it open, his face is a calm mask. My
eyes trace the pale scar that starts under his left ear and crawls along his
jaw. Unbidden, my mind flashes to the brutal network of scars carved all over
his body beneath the long-sleeved shirts and pants he always wears. Tarren
scowls down at me as if he knows my thoughts.

“Is something wrong?” His voice is
soft but stern. He looks tired. He hasn’t shaved since yesterday, and his aura
is a little choppy, probably from whatever pleasant vestiges of the nightmares
he’s still carrying.

I shake my head to clear my
thoughts. “I was just wondering…” my words peter out, and I hate that he still
intimidates me. “We’ve been on the road awhile.”

“You want to train?”

I nod and feel stupid.

“It’s late,” Tarren says.

“Never mind,” I mumble.

Tarren steps back from the door
allowing me to enter. “We’ll need to be quiet. We can go over some choke
holds.”

I hesitate and then follow him into
the room.

Gabe informs me that driving cross
country is a total suck fest. I soon understand what he means. The roads are
like endless veins filled with loud, lumbering trucks and nondescript cars and
SUVs. The more I see of America, the more it seems like the same collection of fast
food joints and big ass everything retailers stamped over and over again across
the changing landscape.

The only thing that inspires any
type of interest is the wholly strange museums and tourist traps that weathered
billboards announce with amusing and tacky gusto. We pass signs for the World
Museum of Mining, an inflatable funhouse amusement park, tours of old mines,
and, in the heart of small town Montana, a sign for a two-headed calf. Gabe
begs Tarren to pull over for this one to no avail.

As the sun sets on the first day,
taking with it the thin veil of sustenance that helps dull the edge of my
hunger, I start looking for distractions. I’ve read all the books I’ve brought
with me from Diana’s bookshelf and played Gabe’s PSP to death.

I notice a billboard up ahead for
some online technical college that teaches people to be X-ray technicians. The
sign makes it seem like being an X-ray technician is the shit. There’s this
girl in a medical smock smiling her pretty face off, because now she’s in high
demand and can make a steady income, blah, blah, blah.

College. I was a liberal arts
student a month ago, pursuing a degree in literature and the noble dream of
starving artistdom. Sure, it was a stupid and unoriginal dream, but it was mine
to energetically pursue with all the naïve exuberance at my command. We had
Avalon.

I think about our destination,
Poughkeepsie, NY. It’s right on the border of Connecticut where I went to
school. Where I grew up. Where Ryan was buried.

So not going there. Both
metaphorically and literally. Tarren has already explained why I must sever
every single tie with my old life. Grand is searching for me. If he thinks I’m
reaching out to old friends, or my parents, they’ll be put in danger, dragged
down this black drain just like Ryan.

That billboard for the X-ray
technician is long gone, but the question it sparked is rattling in my head.

“Gabe, when you were a kid, what
did you want to be when you grew up?” I ask.

Gabe, who just took over the
driving at the last exit, looks over his shoulder at me. “Huh?”

“You know, astronaut, fireman, ice
skater?”

“Ice skater. Uh-huh. Definitely.
I’ve always wanted the world to see my junk outlined in spandex and sequins.”

“Come on.”

I kind of expect something wistful
to light up in his aura, but his colors don’t change. He taps his fingers on
his lower lip and then shrugs.

“Nothing really. I always knew this
is what I would be doing. You know, slaying evil, saving the innocent, being
worshipped by adoring, busty female fans. It’s a pretty good gig.”

“Alright, fair enough.” I roll my
eyes. “But, like, what about after? You’re so convinced that we’re going to win
this thing, what then? Life after angels.”

“Huh.” A few pale marigold threads
seep into Gabe’s aura. Tarren looks up from a thick biology textbook he’s
taking notes from and tunes in on our conversation.

Gabe shrugs. “Never really thought
about it. I don’t know. I guess if I had to work, maybe an MMA instructor, but
I’m really hoping Francesca will bring home the bread so I can be a
stay-at-home dad for our kids.”

“I guess you should mention that
when you get around to informing her that she’s hopelessly in love with you,” I
mutter. Our gorgeous neighbor has been the object of Gabe’s secret longing for
years. I wonder how she would react if she ever found out the two nice boys
down the road weren’t really traveling software salesmen.

“Which soundtrack we on?” Gabe
asks.

“Six,” I reply absently.

“Right-o. Tarren, come on, team
effort.”

Tarren puts down his book, opens
the messy glove compartment and frowns.  “We need to clean this thing out.”

“What about you, Tarren,” I ask.
“What did you want to be when you grew up?”

As soon as the question comes out
of my mouth, I realize it’s a mistake. Tarren never talks about himself, his
feelings, his dreams. It’s all mission all the time. No room for such niceties
as a personality.

“A science professor,” he replies
softly and hands Gabe the requested CD. “Like Dad.”

“Really?” Gabe’s aura jumps. “You
never told me that.”

Tarren closes the glove
compartment. “You never asked.”

“A teacher,” Gabe says. His gaze
swings back and forth from the windshield to his brother.

“I have my GED,” Tarren says. He
cracks open the biology textbook. “I even…” He stops, and I catch a flicker of
orange in his restrained aura.

Gabe also notices the slip. “What?”
he presses. He still holds the CD in his hand. “You even what?”

Tarren’s eyes rest on the pages of
the textbook. His expression is getting hard, and I can tell he regrets
bringing this subject up. That’s our cue to lay off.

“What were you going to say?” Gabe
insists. His face is serious in a way that unnerves me, and his aura is pulsing
fast, flushed with dark blues. I tuck my hands under my legs just to be safe.
The song is loud in the car between us.

“I took some college classes,”
Tarren says, and his voice is tight. “Online. That’s it.”

“When the hell did you get your
GED?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“And college classes? What degree
are you getting?” Gabe asks, even though he must see how Tarren’s face is
growing dark, that stubborn jaw setting like steel. What Gabe can’t know is
that the colors are rising in Tarren’s aura even though he’s holding back his
emotions. Not good colors. Oranges and yellows. Sad, bitter colors.

“I don’t take them anymore,” Tarren
says. “It was a long time ago.”

A long time ago. I know what that
means, and Gabe must too. Before the scars. Before  Tammy was killed and Tarren
became a vigilante machine. Back when he rejected the mission and refused to
fight, as Gabe has told me. It’s astounding to me to try and imagine this
Bizzaro-Tarren who must have had dreams, aspirations, and believed he could
have some sort of regular life.

“You should keep doing the
classes,” Gabe says to Tarren. His aura is expanding, sending chills up through
my arms and into my shoulder sockets. My hands are pouring heat.

Tarren shakes his head, those sad
colors in his aura just pale hints of what he’s really feeling.

“You’re so smart Tarren,” Gabe
says. “You could get your doctorate if you wanted to. You could do anything.”

“Leave it alone,” Tarren growls—his
voice a deep and hollow thunder in his chest.

Pained reds split through Gabe’s
aura. “Whatever. Forget I said anything,” he snaps and shoves the CD into the
disc player. He cranks the volume up as Jimi Hendrix’s All
Along The Watchtower
blares out of the speakers.

***

We make it to Poughkeepsie in late
morning of the third day on the road. Turns out that Poughkeepsie is a quaint,
pretty town right next to a thick vein of dark water, the Hudson River. We’re
all tired and achy, and Gabe finds us a room at a rundown inn.

There’s no time for rest. The
brothers hash out a quick plan, deciding to case the targeted house in the
morning and then return for the kill at night if Hendricks proves to be
present. We each take a turn in the shower, throw on a new change of clothes
and then it’s back to the SUV, which stinks of our bodies and the food the
brothers have eaten on the road.

At least the sky is clear, and the
sun is streaming down, soaking into my skin and soothing my raw hunger.

We push out of Poughkeepsie,
turning onto increasingly smaller, older roads, until we are bumping over
potholes, and spindly branches tap against our windows. Individual houses crop
up every couple of miles or so. I focus on the energy of my brothers, amazed at
how tight and locked each are. Ready for action. The opposite of the jittery
nervousness and uncertainty that is the clay of Maya.

When we hit a dirt track, Tarren
carefully pulls off the road.

“How far out?” he asks Gabe.

“Bout three quarters of a mile.”

“We walk from here. Our cover is
that we’re hikers.”

I get out and shade my eyes. Summer
isn’t leaving New York without a fight. The air is hot and heavy enough to mix
with a wooden spoon. A high chorus of insects thrums through the thick woods on
either side. I feel hemmed in by these large trunks. It’s definitely giving me
a B-horror movie vibe.

“You might want to go hang with
Tarren for a bit,” Gabe says as he jumps out of the passenger seat. “I’ve got
ta’ shake a leg if you know what I mean.”

“It was only a twenty minute
drive,” I tell him.

“Yeah, well, I gotta go again. So
sue me.” He turns and unzips. I beat feet to the other side of the car and
cover my ears. Tarren pulls open the hatch and leans in to collect gear. He
sees me, peers over to Gabe’s side of the car and shrugs.

When I deem it safe and uncover my
ears, Tarren says, “The downside of enhanced hearing, huh?” His mouth quirks up
in a short smile.

“Yeah, I guess,” I reply. This is
weird, us bonding, and I think Tarren recognizes it to, because the smile comes
off his face, and it’s almost like it was never there at all. He goes extra
solider, his back cranking a little straighter.

“I want to go do the recon with
you,” I tell him and try to sound self-assured. “This enhanced hearing,” I tap
my ear, “could come in handy.”

Tarren doesn’t say anything for a
moment, and I know his mind is churning over all the possibilities, weighing
the benefits of my enhanced senses with the negatives of him thinking that I’m
a total screw up.

“Okay,” he says softly, though
there’s still a hint of mistrust in his features.

“Really?” I can’t squelch my
surprise.

“We have a deal,” Tarren reminds
me. Oh yeah. Tarren trains me to fight, and I don’t tell Gabe that Tarren’s the
reason Grand found out about my existence.

Still zipping up, Gabe comes
around.

“We camouflage the car and go in
quiet, just close enough for a view,” Tarren says. “We confirm if Hendricks is
on the premise and if he’s alone, and then we pull back.”

Gabe nods. I nod too, cross my arms
over my chest and try to look like this spy stuff is totally standard. My
brothers arm up. Tarren prefers a 32C Glock on each hip. Gabe slips on two
shoulder holsters and sticks a loaded Barreta PX4 into each one. They both
sling a pair of military grade binoculars around their necks.

While my brothers get ready, I snap
off some heavy branches from nearby tress and stack them up in front of the
Murano. It’s a pretty crappy camo job, but I’ll trust in Gabe’s philosophy that
people don’t notice jack shit.

“Ready?” Tarren asks Gabe.

“Yeah.”

“And you?” Tarren looks over at me.
I could never have envisioned my life heading down this twisted path where
monsters lurk on the other end. But I nod anyway. Gabe throws me a pair of sad
eyes but doesn’t say anything. He hates that I’m doing the mission thing with
them now. Too fucking bad for him.

“We’ll close in on 300 yards,”
Tarren says.

“Check,” I reply as gruffly as I
can, even though I don’t know how far away 300 yards is.

With Tarren in the lead, and Gabe
behind me, we slip into the woods and slowly make our way toward Hendricks’s
house. We don’t pass any other residences on the way.

Fear is a fascinating thing. How it
can crawl into your stomach, small as a gooey larvae and then grow and grow
until it fills up your entire body. Both Tarren and Gabe’s auras are calm. They
have a technique for this that I have not yet learned, but I wonder at the
thoughts that cross their minds. If they can possibly be pushing through the
same mental quicksand that pulls me down further with each step.

“Here,” Tarren says softly. A bead
of sweat trickles down his face, and there are growing patches of wetness
beneath each arm. Sure enough, up ahead, the dirt road leads to a handsome
colonial. Three floors at least, with a heavy façade of bricks and white
siding.

“Lotta cars out there,” Gabe
whispers behind me.

Three SUVs and a jeep are lined up
behind each other at the end of the road. Next to the house is a large metal
barn. Inside the barn is…oh no.

“We may be dealing with more than
just Hendricks,” Tarren says. “We’ll spread out, link up by Bluetooth and find
out how many angels are in that house. Gabe, you take point. Maya and I will…”

“The barn,” I whisper.

Gabe is already climbing up a tree
behind me. Tarren lowers his binoculars. “What?”

“Humans. In the barn.” I feel the
whisper of their auras, even from this distance.

“How many?”

“I don’t know.” I close my eyes,
and try to hone my sense—that new and terrifying predator part of me that
automatically locks onto the pulse of human auras. “There’s something wrong
with their energy. They’re weak. Confused.”

Tarren looks up at Gabe. They don’t
say anything, but I know those identical expressions. They’re sharing
something, and it isn’t good.

“Shit,” Gabe whispers.

Tarren turns back to the house and
raises his binoculars. “Four different vehicles…”

A side door opens from the house,
and two men emerge into the daylight. One is tall and brawny, wearing a torn
muscle shirt and a pair of skinny jeans that suck against his powerful legs.
The second is short, slighter than his companion and blanketed with thick dark
hair on each arm. He’s rocking a heavy gold watch on his wrist that glitters
under the sun.

“Maya?” Gabe asks grimly.

No auras around the two men.
“Angels,” I confirm. “Both of them.”