Dust to Dust (2 page)

She smiles at me. “I got another call from that
Good Morning Charleston
producer.”

I glare at her. “Carson, I already told her
no.
”

“Oh, but Callie, it would be so much fun!” She looks at the sky and her face lights up in the way that tells me she's about to rush down a talking highway at full speed. “They said they'd send a car to get us to take us to the studio! And you wouldn't have to make up anything—if you don't remember what it was like to be in the coma, you can just say that. The producer said that everyone just wants to see you, the girl who almost died. People are really interested in these kind of stories, you know. And maybe you'll even remember something if they ask the right questions and—”

I've been giving her a
no
face this whole time, and she finally pauses. “Cars, I don't want to sit on a couch and smile for the cameras. What happened to me is personal.”

She gives me a sad smile, and I can't tell if she's accepting what I'm saying. I hope so. I mean it. The truth is, I don't understand my time in the coma, and I certainly don't want to try to figure it out on television.

“All right,” sighs Carson. “I give up . . . for now.” Then she
glances up at the house. “So things are okay with your dad and Nick?”

I turn back to the porch to see my father showing Nick the remote control he uses to turn the sprinklers on and off. Dad is frowning in concentration and Nick's face is slightly red.

“It's still awkward, but I think they're both trying,” I say, happy to change the subject.

“It's cute to watch them together,” says Carson, smiling at their stiffness. We break up into laughter and then she gestures at her table. “So what do you think?”

Carson's setting is total Martha Stewart—white tablecloth, Nick's flowers, a tiny votive candle in the center of the table, and sturdy paper plates filled with cole slaw, potato salad, and cold fried chicken. “Wouldn't I make a great girlfriend?” asks Carson, throwing back her glossy brown curls and laughing as she waves Nick and my dad over to dinner. “How did
you
end up with the perfect guy while I'm still as solitary as ten miles of bad road?”

I grin at her. “Just lucky, I guess.” But as I watch Nick walk across the grass toward me, I feel uneasy, like I'm forgetting something that's between us . . . or someone. The phantom pain echoes inside me again and I fish in my pocket for another pill—I have one more left in today's dosage and I'd better save it for bedtime.

When we all grasp hands to say the prayer, my dad bows his head as we all close our eyes.

“Thanks be to God for this table, this food, and the friends who are sharing it. Our eternal gratitude for Callie's second chance at life, Carson's loyal friendship, and Nick's pure love of our girl.”

Carson squeezes my hand and I almost giggle and break the silence—embarrassing!—but when I open my eyes, Nick is smiling at me. It's a nice moment, one I can't imagine having had at the beginning of the summer, when my dad was telling me I was too young for a boyfriend. Back then he hardly ever made time for a sit-down meal; I fended for myself at night with leftovers that our housekeeper tucked into the fridge while he got home past dinnertime and our conversations consisted mostly of him setting boundaries and me nodding dutifully with my fingers crossed behind my back.

Before the crash, I looked for this sense of contentment in all the wrong places—in the rush of wind as I drove too fast, in the free-fall sensation of jumping off a too-high cliff into a swimming hole. I put myself in danger just so I could feel something. I used to need a thrill to feel alive, but now this will do.

It's a whole new world since I almost died, and everyone I love is sitting around this table.

Well, almost everyone.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

WHEN I SAY GOOD-BYE to Nick and Carson after a full meal and a “Happy Recovery, Callie!” cake, complete with rose piping and near-perfect pink script (Carson's practicing her frosting skills), Nick whispers in my ear, “See you later.”

This is the first night that I insist my father not help me up the stairs to my room—I'm ready to live my life again, on my own, and it only takes a little bit longer than usual for me to navigate the steps. He's still there with a glass of water, though, to tuck me into bed and give me a kiss on my forehead.

“Daddy,” I say, when he stands up to leave my room. “You know I'm not eight years old, right?”

His eyes crinkle up around the edges for a moment, and I wonder if he's getting emotional, but then he clears his throat. “Yes,” he says. “Believe me. I know I missed that time.”

He's not wrong to have regrets about the way he walled off his grief and stopped connecting with the world, including me, after Mama died when I was six years old. He did miss a lot.

“Well . . . good night,” he says. And it's just a word, but the way he says it is softer than usual, like he's trying to convey something deeper. I smile at him in the doorway, hoping he can tell that I appreciate his efforts to show me his affection.

As my father's footsteps echo down the hallway, though, loneliness creeps in. Looking around my room, at the wide window seat, the soft yellow curtains, the photos on my antique-looking desk, something is . . . out of place. A flash, a memory, races through my brain—I'm in this room, but it's not real. It shimmers, just out of reach. I can't touch anything; there's nothing solid.
I'm not solid.

But he was.
Thatcher
. He moved at my side like an opposing magnet, never quite touching me but always close, always watching, always protecting me from . . . what?

I've been having nightmares since the accident. Just this morning I woke up with a jolt, and a lingering image of my bedroom—this very room—ransacked and destroyed, its contents scattered and broken as if a tornado had ripped through it. And I remember a voice,
his
voice, telling me to be careful, to stay alert. In the journal next to my bed, I wrote down Thatcher's words so I wouldn't forget them. I'm almost afraid to look at them now, but when I open the page, I see my own shaky handwriting and I can hear him saying, “I'll find them. I'll protect you.”

I grab a pen quickly and scribble out the words. They're nonsense. They're the fog my dad was talking about, the haze of the pills
and the misfired synapses in my post-coma brain. But it's strange to me that it's only in the early morning, when my pill is wearing off, that these visions and voices—these nightmares—come.

A small bead of dread settles into my stomach, so I close the journal and put it back in its place underneath the books in my nightstand's top drawer. Then I quietly lift up my comforter to step onto the floor. The feeling of the soft tufted rug under my feet does a little to ease my worries and ground me back in my world. This is real. I am here.

So why, for a moment, did it seem like I was somewhere far away?

I hear the leaves on the oak tree outside rustling. I walk to the window, carefully moving the dangling glass prism that Nick gave to me in the hospital aside before I slide it open.

In one motion, Nick moves from the thick branch that reaches toward my house into my room, stepping onto the window seat and then softly to the floor.

“What are you doing out of bed, young lady?” he asks me.

“I wanted to greet you right,” I say, taking his hand and leaning into his chest—strong, sturdy, tangible.

How silly of me to think there's nothing solid here. Nick is the most solid thing of all.

It's the other boy who invades my thoughts,
Thatcher
. Who isn't here. Who doesn't exist. And when Nick is around, Thatcher doesn't invade my dreams.

I shake my head to knock away the crazy, and Nick steps back, putting his hand under my chin. A trickling sensation of near-pain
blurs the edges of my body and I break away from his touch, sitting back on my bed as I swallow my last pill of the day.

Nick perches beside me. I watch him reach into his pocket.

“I've been meaning to return this to you,” he says, and he hands me a heart-shaped amber pendant on a silver chain. I take it into my palm and finger its smooth edges. Nick had given it to me as a gift last year, a replacement for a heart-shaped jade charm that my mother gave to me once upon a time. When I lost the jade piece, I was devastated—it felt like I was losing Mom all over again. I told Nick about it, and he bought the amber heart to remind me that other people loved me too.

A notion, maybe a memory, settles behind my eyes. Nick took this pendant while I was in the hospital; he held on to it so he could have a piece of me. I remember seeing him with it . . . I remember. . . .

I shake my head. I'm making things up again.

“I took it after . . . ,” Nick starts. But he pauses. “Anyway, that doesn't matter now,” he says. “This heart is yours again.”

He smiles at his own cheesy words and I grin back at him.

“Thank you.” I open up the clasp so he can put it around my neck. I want it close to me.

After he fastens it, he kisses the top of my head and I lean into him with a sigh. “I'm so tired,” I say.

“Don't overdo it.” Nick looks around pensively. “I probably shouldn't even be here, Cal.”

“You should,” I tell him. “That's not what I meant. I want you here. I love you here.”

We snuggle into position on my double bed—Nick sitting up
against the headboard and me resting my head on his chest. Since I've been home from the hospital, Nick has snuck in to be with me whenever he can make an excuse to his parents. I fall asleep more easily with him near. Without him, my dreams are filled with dark echoes of the imagined world I created, the Prism—it's foggy and uncertain, a glimmering gray space that feels part peaceful and part menacing, like a place among the clouds where both warming sun and threatening thunderstorms hover. But with Nick, I'm not in the clouds. I'm firmly on the earth.

Today has been a good day, and I smile as the pill takes effect. No more phantom sensation, no more paranoia about a world that doesn't exist, no more false memories—just two sixteen-year-olds alone in a bedroom. I look up at Nick with sleepy eyes and whisper, “Kiss me.”

He does, more passionately than I expect. His familiar lips move over mine and he reaches to touch my hair and the sides of my face as his tongue explores my mouth. It's the first time since the accident that he isn't treating me like I'm fragile, and my body responds to the delicious touches as his hand moves down the front of my soft cotton nightgown, brushing my chest and working its way to my hips.

My mind flashes for just a moment to another world, one where touching was discouraged, where connections were supposed to be more than just physical. But with Nick's breath in my ear, his hands on my body, that thought is quickly dismissed. I'm tired of the weird ways my brain is wandering; I want something normal and grounded—I want this.

Nick pulls me closer, and I wrap one leg around his back so I can to be as near to him as possible, my breath ragged in between kisses. My nightgown slips up to my waist and when he runs his hand up my thigh, my entire body lights up with sensation. I haven't felt this kind of touch in so long.

A moan escapes me and I kiss him harder, so ready to feel alive again, ready to take things even further than we ever have—I wanted to go all the way before the accident, but Nick held back. Maybe tonight's the night. I put my hand under his shirt and trace the hard contours of his back as Nick lowers his lips to kiss my neck, pressing his body against mine so I can tell how much he wants this too.

But when I move my other hand lower, Nick pulls away suddenly, standing up and looking at me with confused eyes.

“We shouldn't,” he says. “I'm sorry, I—this could hurt you. You're not ready for something this . . . physical.”

When we stop, I feel half disappointed and half relieved as the passion I felt drains out of me. I flop back onto my pillow with a sigh. “When will everyone stop treating me like I'm a broken little baby bird?”

Nick tilts his head to one side teasingly. “You kind of are a broken little baby bird,” he says. So I throw a pillow at him.

He catches it and sits back down on the bed.

“Come here,” he says, holding up his arm.

I pout at him.

“Callie, we'll get back to that stuff soon enough,” he says. “It just doesn't feel right just now.”

“Okay,” I say quietly.

I lean into him again and he gives my arm a gentle squeeze. The moment is gone, and I wonder where it went.
It just doesn't feel right
. Nick's words echo in my head as I close my eyes and try to fall asleep.

The aliveness, the sensation of touching and kissing and feeling, is so very right. But Nick isn't all wrong. Something seems off to me too. Nick is warm and familiar with his soft brown curls and warm, smooth cheeks and smiling, kissable lips that used to move so well with mine. And yet I can't shake this uneasy feeling I have sometimes when he and I are alone. A feeling that I've let go of him, and I've already said good-bye in my heart.

I wake up in the middle of the night and Nick is gone. My phone says it's just after three a.m. I turn onto my side and face the window, slowly closing my eyes again.

Crack!
I sit up, startled, and find myself staring at the newly fractured glass in my bottom windowpane. Shakily, I stand to inspect it. It's a single line, not like the spiral spiderweb that would happen if someone threw a rock—more like a break created by extreme pressure. I trace my finger along the ridge of it, and as I do, a low thrum of energy rattles my body.