Falling (20 page)

The rain is calming down when the houses give way to the
wide open fields of Marymoor Park. Everything seems drowned, hunched over to
wait out the night. Ryan always accused me of being overdramatic.

Flashlights cut through the branches, diluted with distance.
I hear the soft sucking of boots pulling away from mud. The police are still
searching through the night for Sunshine Bailey, unaware that her killer is a
little redheaded cheerleader who could snap a grown man’s neck with her bare
hands.

I look up into the trees, earning a fresh baptism. I know where
she is.

I climb, hands digging into the tree trunk, pine needles
combing into my hair. The branches tremble and shed pearl curtains of water
when I step upon them. I am soaked and shivering, sucking on my torn fingertips
as I jump from branch to branch. After a few slips, I kick off my shoes to gain
better traction.

My new memory serves me well. I’m condemned to remember
every laceration on Tarren’s body in precise detail and the glassy eyes of
every animal I’ve murdered, but it doesn’t take me long to retrace my steps and
find Amber.

I see her silhouetted against the sky — a dark shadow of a
girl sitting on a preposterously high branch. It’s the same towering spruce
tree where I found the swatch of flannel, and now I know what it came from.
She’s wearing the same blue flannel pajama pants along with an old Strawberry
Shortcake t-shirt soaked against her body.

The girl watches me as I climb. The wind has decided to rest
its voice. The rain is a faint mist. This is peace by exhaustion.

“Hey,” I call.

“Leave me alone.” Her red hair is unbound and plastered
around her head.

“But I just climbed up this huge tree.”

“This is you trying to be my friend.”

“No,” I pause, thinking. “I just want the record to show I
climbed this huge tree, and it was hard.”

“Not that hard,” the girl says softly. “Not for me.”

I manage to balance on two thin branches a little below her.

“Amber?”

“Are you going to kill me?” Her voice is solemn but beneath
it I catch a hiccup of fear.

I look up at her. “I don’t know.”

“You’re not actually supposed to say that. You’re supposed
to say ‘no, of course not. I just want to talk.’”

“I do want to talk.”

Amber’s face is the false calm of exhaustion, the kind when
you’ve wrenched your heart so hard you can’t feel anything anymore.
Ryan with worms crawling out of his eyes
.

“Maybe I deserve to die.” Her pale feet kick back and forth.
“I’ve killed people.”

“I know.”

“I killed Amanda. I told her not to come over. Ever again.
That I was moving to Tahiti to live in the wild. Amanda came over anyway. She’d
made a card.”

“Oh,” and that’s all I say, because so often when the moment
demands something brave or comforting or meaningful, the good words dissolve
like ghosts from my mind, and what I’m left with are crumbs like “oh.”

“And Grandpa says I’m special now. We’re going to move, but
I’ll kill people there too. I’ll just keep killing.”

“You can control it.”

“No, I tried.” Her hands fold into tight fists. Glowing
fists.

“I know what you’re going through.”

The girl gives me an appraising look. “No you don’t. You’re
muddled.”

“Muddled?”

Amber slides backward, so that she’s hanging upside down,
knees bent around the branch. Her face is close to mine, and I feel the energy
emanating from her. No, not from her — within her. The light pulses softly
beneath her skin, someone else’s energy. She’s fed recently.

“I can see your energy, but it’s gray, and there’s not much
of it. Gray like smoke,” she says.

“I don’t have an aura.”

“Yes you do. There’s still some human left in you.” She
swings back and forth, thick clumps of hair coming loose from her back, hanging
like tentacles. “You’re not as strong as me. I can tell. And you’re hungry.
Really hungry.”

She’s right. Even as we’re talking, even as I’m trying to
keep my balance on the branches beneath my feet, the song of hunger is tapping
off each rib, echoing through every blood vessel.

“Grandpa says I need to accept this new reality. That I’m an
angel, and angels are meant to be better than humans.”

“That’s not true.” My voice sounds weak, unconvincing.

“We’re stronger and smarter. I’ve memorized most of my
history textbook. Ask me anything about the Civil War. You might be surprised
to know that the greatest killer of all was disease. Dysentery was rampant.”

“Amber, I think I can help you.”

“And that’s not all…” The girl lifts her legs and allows
herself to fall.  Her body is in motion. With a sharp, graceful twist — the
type of grace that usually requires a harness and ropes or CG effects to
accomplish — she’s suddenly standing in front of me, balancing on my branches as
they bend beneath our combined weight. I know somewhere, somehow this is funny.
My teddy bear and her Strawberry Shortcake grin at each other, hiding murder
beneath wet fabric and cold skin. Two terrified hearts drum against each other.

She is taller than me, thicker and more muscled from her
transformation, glowing with the vitality of a fresh kill.

“There’s also this.” Amber extends her hand, and a phantom
force pushes me off my perch. I tumble backwards, enfolded in night and shrill
wind for a horrifying second before crashing into a branch below. As I slip
off, I wrap my arms around it and twist back on. The air isn’t getting into my
lungs fast enough, and pain crashes cymbals up and down my arm.

“I’m getting stronger.” Amber looks down at me, tentacle
hair framing her face. “At first I could only move little things. Flip open a
book. Toss a tennis ball across the room. But each time I feed I can throw a
little harder. Pick up heavier things.”

I scramble up as she leaps off her branches and lands on the
edge of mine.

“I don’t think you can do that,” she says. Her face is too
stoic for a child. Too cold.

“The killing gets easier too.” Amber takes a step forward.
Phantom hands push me back a step toward the trunk. “I’m not evil, at least not
yet. I feel bad about the people I’ve killed. There was a cop tonight. He
probably had a family. A wife. Children. It tears me up inside. I think about
Amanda all day. About her parents. I come up here to cry. I can’t be evil if I
still cry, right?” Her voice warbles and pain echoes across her pale face. For
a moment she stares at me. Beseeching.  Lost like I have been lost ever since
the day Grand stood in my path.

Amber takes another step forward. I hold against her power,
but my feet are slipping against the wet bark.

“The thing is,” her voice is hardly above a whisper, “maybe
Grandpa is right about the new elite. Maybe this is the way things are meant to
be. A new and better race. Wolves and sheep. I don’t know about that. The only
thing I do know about is the hunger. I have to feed, so that’s what I do.”

Amber closes the gap between us. “I don’t want to die, so
I’m going to have to kill you instead.”

She leaps toward me, but I tear myself out of her power and
jump to the next tree. Pine needles grab savagely at my hair as I pull myself
up on a steady branch. Even as I’m scrambling for my balance, the branch
trembles, and Amber is standing in front of me again. She is a checkered ghost
— hidden where the shadows drape across her body and shining as the
newly-revealed moon touches her through the branches. Before I can stand, her
fingers wrap around my throat.  She slams me down on the branch, and the night
pulses strange colors in my eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers into my ear. A tear trembles on
her lower eyelid then makes the jump to her cheek. “You’re the first one I’ve
gotten to apologize to.”

I kick hard, connecting to Amber’s ribs. She hisses with
pain and tightens her hold. I’m grappling with her wrist, trying to loosen her
hand, but she’s stronger than me, much stronger. Thoughts are backing up in my
mind, crashing into each other as the knots of panic tie off reason. I know I’m
dying, and for some strange reason I only want to laugh. Her nails pierce my
skin. I’m terrified and giggly. I get a knee into her stomach, and the hands
loosen. I try to snatch a breath.

Amber pulls me up and slams me down against the limb again.
This time the night blinks out. The world is quiet, the hunger gone…for a
moment, and then I’m back. Confused. Twitching. Almost out of air. A little
girl’s face peers over mine, long tentacles reaching for me. Why is she in
pajamas? My hands drop away from her wrist. I should try to kick again, but my
legs are too heavy. I can’t seem to understand what’s happening or really care anymore.
The terror is loosening but whatever thoughts were backing up are gone. There
is only a darkness that might not be the night sky. I can’t find the stars.

A
hiss
and the rain starts again.
Not rain. The fingers on my neck relax. Amber is falling toward me, rolling off
the branch. Then she’s gone, and I’m gasping for breath, tasting metal in my
mouth. I hear her body smack against a branch and then a final
thump
as it hits the soft ground below. The stars are back
in the sky. Maybe they never left. Head throbbing. Thoughts percolating but
unfinished.
Blood? Don’t fall.

A voice calls below. “Maya?”

I carefully twist over to my stomach and squint past the
powerful flashlight beam. Tarren is peering up at me, the gun at his side.

* * *

The pain drums through my skull, big, powerful timpani
beats. Small clips of time keep slipping away. Arms shaking, so weak, as I
lower myself from the branches.

Gone.

On the ground, somehow, kneeling against the tree. Tarren’s
eyes in mine.

“Is it raining again?” I murmur, because we need something
to talk about, or this might be awkward. I have a strange croaking voice that I
don’t recognize. My neck feels pulpy and bruised like rotted fruit.

Gone.

Tarren on his knees in front of me, saying something. That
scar and the others concealed, but I can still see them. Secrets hidden in the
scars or because of the scars.

“Huh?”

“I asked if you’re bleeding.” Tarren’s voice is soft.
Something strange in his face.

“I think it’s hers. Are those my shoes?” A pair of muddy
sneakers are tied together at the laces and slung over his shoulder. “Why did
you steal my shoes?”  The song. He’s too close, and there’s this expression on
his face.

Gone.

“Come on Maya, your head. Did you hit your head?” His voice
going deeper like the creases across his forehead.

“Of course not. I was very good about my head. The tree did
though.” Nothing from Tarren. Doesn’t he think this is funny? Won’t he ever
smile?

Tarren reaches out, hesitates, then touches my head lightly,
running his fingers over the surface of my scalp until I hiss in pain.

“Ah,” he says.

Gone.

Fingers in my hair, feather touches, but it still hurts.

“I feel the contusion, but there’s no blood,” Tarren says.
“That’s good.”

And suddenly I’m so afraid, because I can’t be losing time.
Not when Tarren is this close to me with his energy and its colors and the song
making me so crazy that my thoughts are scattered like puzzle pieces; broken
like glass shards; splattered like raindrops; scrambled like eggs; spotty like
a Dalmatian; far, far away like the stars hidden behind the clouds. Not when
I’m fighting each and every second with all the reserve I’ve got left.

“Tarren, please,” I cry out, too loud. I twist my head away
from his hands and scramble backwards into the solid tree at my back.

Tarren flinches and drops his hands. “Oh, of course,” he
says, and his face is changing. The creases come out, and his mouth sets.
Whatever was there before, the thing that I would have sworn was concern if it
hadn’t been perched upon that particular face, is gone.

My thoughts are coming back, stitched crooked but good
enough. I instinctively press my palms into the ground, groaning as mud seeps
between my fingers. Amber is sprawled a couple feet away. Her arm is twisted
behind her, and she looks like a broken doll some careless child dropped and
forgot to put away.

“You killed her,” I say, turning back to Tarren.

“Yes. She clearly could not control her hunger.”

I take note of this slight shift. Tarren could have said
because she was an angel
. Maybe it’s all the same to him.
Maybe not. His eyes are all dark and hooded now, and he’s being more careful
with his energy. I’ve tipped him off too much about what I can see.

I look at the girl, who was still a girl even when she
wasn’t. Monster and victim. “What now?”

“I bury her.”

“Oh. Okay. Where?”

“Don’t worry about that. You’re going back to the motel.”

If I were brave, I would say “no, you shouldn’t do it
alone.” I would accompany Tarren into the night. I would help him wrap up the
broken, bloody body in tarp. We would wrestle the wet ground out of the way
with our shovels and lower the child into a shallow ditch. If I were brave, I
would say something good and meaningful to Amber before we pushed the sloppy
mud upon her. Maybe I could forgive her, or at least tell her that I really do
understand about the hunger and the things it made her do. These same lures
dance in my head, so close to reality that a single slip will propel them from
my mind into a living nightmare.

But I am not brave. I am tired and wet and numb. I feel like
a little girl myself as I sit in the car waiting for Tarren to emerge from the
woods carrying his tarp-wrapped burden. When he does, I notice the slightest
dip in the vehicle as he lays her body down in the trunk.

Tears slip down my face as we head back. Tarren is silent
about this and the lipstick, which is no longer on the back window, and about
everything else I have done wrong tonight.

I lean against the doorframe, opening and closing my eyes,
trying to figure out which one is less painful for my throbbing head. I try to
swallow then stop trying. Instead, I wonder about the strange expression I
caught on Tarren’s face. About why he got so close to me without keeping a hand
on his gun.

Gone.

We are at the motel. The car idles. Tarren waits for me to
get out. I turn my head and stare at my brother. Tired and strong. Smart,
bristling, cut to shreds. Handsome and hidden. So angry. Afraid of living most
of all.

I decide it’s time to throw a battering ram at the wall
between us, see if I can wend some cracks through the thick mortar.

“You remembered me,” I say.

“You were unarmed. I couldn’t let…”

“When I was a baby. You remembered.”

Tarren draws back a little, and I can see his mind shifting
quickly, recovering, re-evaluating, growing cautious. “A little. It was a long
time ago.”

“And the birthmark. That’s how Gabe found me. You remembered
my birthmark.”

Another pause as Tarren studies my expression. He turns off
the engine. He waits.

“When Grand took me, he, he,” I pull in a shaky breath,
because here it comes — the imprisoned memories are un-gagged and released from
their chains — “he knew about the birthmark. He wasn’t sure it was me until he
saw it. How did he know about that Tarren?” My voice cracks, mind cracks,
memories rampaging, crushing boxes. “How could he know?”

Tarren’s eyes are as dark a blue as they ever get, and he’s
clamping down on his energy as if this doesn’t tell me everything.

“After Grand captured you, tortured you, why would he just
let you go?”

Tarren doesn’t say anything, so I answer my own question.
“He wouldn’t. You made a deal for your freedom. You had something valuable to
trade. Say something. Fuck!”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

Tarren breaks our gaze. The granite crumbles from his face,
leaving something more vulnerable that he hides by looking off into the half
empty parking lot.

“Yes, I told Grand about you. About the birthmark.”

I wait for more, the spill of confession, the breakdown, the
stubborn justifications. All I get is his face in profile, tiny flicks of
energy escaping his grip.

“Won’t you even make an excuse?” I whisper.

“No.”

“But he was torturing you. Cutting you up. Defend what you
did!”

“No Maya, I won’t. You should hate me.”

I slump against the window, balling my hands into fists and
tucking them between my legs. How can he keep doing this to me? I pull in a
deep breath and then magically, wonderfully, finally, I know exactly what to
say.

“Sometimes I do, but I’m beginning to realize that I can
never hate you more than you hate yourself.”

Tarren nods, accepting the blow.

“And Tammy?” I ask. “How could you bargain for your own life
and not hers?”

What to make of Tarren’s face, the way it looks right now,
like he’s withstanding exquisite torture but inviting it too. How to describe
what his repressed aura is doing — seething with orange flames, neon yellows
and bloody reds — a thousand fine filaments glowing with his shame, his anger,
with so many other emotions I cannot identify. Yet, he is still holding himself
back; I am only seeing vapors of the full heartbreak inside of him.

“I couldn’t save Tammy,” Tarren whispers.

How to describe him at all when he hides every part of
himself behind a thousand granite shields. I wonder if that shy little boy he
once was is curled up in the center of the phalanx, or if his shields are protecting
nothing at all.

I’m not angry. Just tired. Wet and wrung. Still shivering.
Hungry. We’ve been sitting here in silence too long.

“Gabe doesn’t know, does he?”

“No.” Tense. Tarren doesn’t realize that this isn’t the
punishment.

“You never told him how Grand found out about me.”

“No.”

“Maybe Gabe could have found me sooner, before Grand” — I
almost say “tricked you,” but swallow those words and manage — “came after me.
You could have warned me or hid me, or, I don’t know, something.”

“It’s possible,” he says.

“Then why Tarren?”  Silence. “To salvage your pride?” I
can’t understand the expression on his face. Can’t understand anything about
him.

“Aren’t you even sorry?” I cry.

Tarren’s energy escapes his control and jumps up high
between us — a conflagration of pained red and deepest ochre that blasts open
my palms. He wrestles it down again.

“Yes.” Quiet. Strained behind closed teeth. “Yes,” he says
again, this one even softer. It would have been nearly inaudible to my old
ears.

I open the door of the SUV. Rain pecks at my leg and
shoulder as I step out. Deep, moist breath. Puddles broken and clouded by my
muddy feet.

“I won’t tell Gabe.”

We look at each other, defenses dented but holding.

“Thank you,” he whispers.

“I need to learn to fight.”

“I’ll teach you.” He starts the engine.

“Good.” I close the door, and Tarren drives away, leaving
the ghost of Grand trailing chilled fingers down my back. Searching.
Discovering what he knows is there. He baited my brothers with their own
concern. Tricked and followed them to me.
I knew they would
find you.
Faulty heroes, but I won’t tell them. There is pain enough
already. Guilt enough. Burdens enough for us all.

I tilt my head back and catch falling raindrops in my mouth.
They taste like rust, but I feel a little more human for doing it.