For This Life Only (11 page)

They belonged here. They felt safe and comforted. Crap might be raining down on other aspects of their lives, but being here made them feel better and offered reassurance.

My eyes burning, I turned away from the sanctuary, focusing my attention on something—anything—else.

The architectural drawings that I'd seen in the church office yesterday were now propped on discreetly placed easels. I pretended to study the drawings on the easel near the outside doors, though from where I stood I could make out little more than big squares that obviously indicated new buildings, and a couple of words here and there. “Community Center.” “Bookstore.” “Parking Structure.” “Coffeehouse.”

“Hey.” A hand touched mine.

I turned to find Leah at my side. She was dressed in a black cardigan and skirt, similar to what my mom was wearing. I wondered if that was intentional.

She was also standing too close to me.

“Leah. Hey.” I took an awkward step back to put space between us, my cast catching on a grout line in the tile and causing me to stumble even farther from her.

She frowned. “Are you—”

“Yes, fine,” I said, more sharply than I should have.

Her gaze skated over my face, searching for truth and not finding it.

“How are you?” I asked, redirecting the conversation before she could push. And knowing Leah, whether the old one or the new one who was trying to be my friend, she would push.

Her eyes watered, and I regretted the question. “I'm all right. Some moments are better than others.” She smiled bravely. “I mean,
you
know.”

I did, but it wasn't something I wanted to discuss with her. She wouldn't understand my doubts and fears. When Leah had come over the other day and asked me to talk about Eli sometimes, I'd thought she meant things like his annoying tendency to eat food “in order”—chips from the most seasoning to the least, Skittles by color, and in clockwise sequence on his plate—or how he analyzed movies to death in search of a theme.

But Leah had obviously interpreted our conversation differently.

“I wondered if it would be okay if I sat with you guys tonight?” she asked, biting her lip.

Automatically, I looked over my shoulder at my mom. She and Sarah were about to go into the sanctuary.

My mom turned then, looking back for me to join them. But when she noticed Leah next to me, she caught my eye and nodded, unspoken permission to continue my conversation. She bent down and whispered something to Sarah, and the two of them crossed into the sanctuary.

“Uh, sure,” I said to Leah. Under my shirt, my back grew sticky with sweat. At this point, I was still trying to convince myself that I could walk in and take a seat. With Leah there, sad-faced and wanting to share, I wasn't sure I could be in the building.

“I know, it's not the same.” Leah took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But I feel so close to him here. I know he's watching over us.” She looked up at the ceiling with a smile. “Don't you feel him here?”

It was hard to feel anything at the moment except the constriction in my chest.

“Uh-huh,” I managed.

“I think he'll like seeing us all together,” Leah continued. “Knowing that we have each other to get us through.”

I looked away from Leah, staring blindly at the building drawings again.

This time, through the sidelight window behind the easel, I caught the faintest hint of a blue glow. The blue neon palm had not been lit when we'd come in from the parking lot, but, with Psychic Mary's usual timing, it was now.

Thera.

The thought of her, angry and snarling at me at first, and then saying all the things that no one else would, made the tightness in my lungs ease slightly.

I moved away from Leah and toward the exit before I had time to think about it.

“Jace?” she asked with a confused frown.

“Yeah, just . . . I need some air. Go ahead. I'll meet you in there.” I fumbled for a smile, trying to make it believable.

“All right,” she said uncertainly.

I took the opportunity and the seminatural break in the excruciating conversation to make a stilted run for the doors.

I didn't care if it was rude. I needed out.

Pushing the door open, I stepped outside. It was sleeting now, and the little bits of ice bounced off my face and down the collar of my shirt, melting instantly.

With a solid thunk, the church door closed behind me.

I inhaled deeply. The air was so sharp with cold that it hurt, but it wasn't enough to dispel the tension thrumming through me.

I took one step down, and then another, half expecting to hear the doors open behind me, someone calling my name. The equivalent of a lightning bolt or a sign from above to stop me. But the only sound was the clinking hiss of the sleet hitting the ground, and my shoe and casted foot crunching in it, moving faster than they had in weeks.

The road was dark and empty, traffic a distant hum at the intersection down the block, so it only took me a few seconds to cross the street and climb the sagging porch stairs.

My hand shaking, I pressed the doorbell. But there was no sound inside, no echo of the bell.

I knocked on the splintery wooden door, white paint flecks raining down on the worn welcome mat below.

“Come on, come on,” I whispered.

The curtain on the window next to the door fluttered, revealing a flash of dark hair and pale skin.

But the door didn't open.

I knocked again, a little harder this time, and the sound of a dead bolt retracting finally greeted me.

I lowered my hand, and the hinges squealed in protest as Thera pulled the door back. “I tried the doorbell,” I said.

“It doesn't work,” Thera said. “What are you doing here?” She shivered and folded her arms across her chest. She wasn't dressed for outside, wearing only a tank top and boxer shorts, and I could see the goose bumps rising on her skin. “Don't you have somewhere else to be?” she asked, tipping her head toward the church behind me. Even out here I could hear the organ music. The opening hymn, most likely.

An excellent question. What exactly had I come for? Now that I was here, I wasn't sure anymore. “No, I wanted to . . .” I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my khakis. “I guess I wanted to talk.”

“About what?” she asked, taking a step back, as if
preparing to shut the door on me. “If this is about Eli again, I don't have—”

“I died,” I said, the words startling me in their starkness. I'd never said them out loud, not to anyone.

Her mouth opened in surprise, and she went still.

“That night in the car. It wasn't just Eli. I died too. For a few minutes. They brought me back,” I said, my voice catching.

The wind, sweeping under the porch roof, blasted pellets of sleet at us. Thera wrapped her arms tighter around herself but didn't retreat.

“I didn't see anything, though,” I said, studying the hinges of the door. Saying these words aloud felt like speaking in a foreign language for the first time; I wasn't sure what I was doing, nothing felt familiar or right. “When I was gone, there was just nothing. Blackness.”

My throat swelled with all the emotion I'd been fighting to keep down. “And then, when I woke up and they told me Eli was dead, I realized . . .” I worked my jaw back and forth, trying to get a grip on my runaway feelings. “I realized I'd done that to him. I got my brother killed, and worse than that, if what I saw is right, I made him not exist. Not here, not in heaven, not anywhere.”

The last word exploded out of me in a gasp, and tears—ones I wasn't allowed to shed because this was all my fault—overflowed, hot on my face.

Thera was quiet for a moment. Then she squared her shoulders, seeming to come to a decision.

“Come on.” She reached out and caught my wrist, tugging me across the threshold.

THE ENTRYWAY OF THERA'S
house smelled of cookies and something flowery.

I rubbed my sleeve over my eyes to get rid of the tears, but my throat felt raw and full in a way that suggested they might start again anytime.

Thera shut and locked the door behind me, holding a finger up to her lips. “She's with a phone client,” she said, tipping her head toward the closed pocket doors to my right. I could hear the faint murmur of a female voice beyond them.

“This way.” Thera moved around me and then started up the stairs, her bare feet light on the worn wooden treads.

Out of habit, I wiped my feet on the mat, then followed her. Lots of framed photos decorated the wall on
the way up, covering but not hiding the faded and peeling wallpaper. Everything here seemed old, but not messy or dirty, unlike the outside of their house. Nothing screamed “paranormal” here either. No Ouija boards or crystal balls that I could see, no strange symbols painted on the walls.

At the top of the stairs, Thera walked into the only lit room.

I stopped in the doorway. The room was small, with angles in the ceiling that made it feel even smaller, and the bed, covered in a quilt and a tidy assortment of textbooks and notebooks, dominated the space. A brightly colored rag rug, flattened and dulled by time and use, lay right by the bed. Pages torn out of magazines and books—at a quick glance, they all appeared to be photos or sketches of bridges—were taped to the slanted ceiling, right above where it met the walls. But the windows were old and big, so the overall effect wasn't so much claustrophobic as cozy, a hideaway from the world. It wasn't anything like what I'd expected from her, not that I had any specific idea of what to expect.

“Come in,” Thera said. “Sit there.” She pointed to a heavy wooden rocker in the corner. “I'll get you a towel.”

She disappeared into the hallway, her feet padding softly on the floor, before I could respond.

I dropped into the rocker, scrubbing my hands over my face. My eyes felt hot and swollen.

Thera returned in a few seconds. “Here.” She passed me a towel, green and soft-looking, with frayed edges.

“I'm sorry,” I said, as she retreated to sit on the edge of her bed. “I'm not sure what I'm doing here. I just couldn't be over there anymore, and I didn't know where else to go.” Said aloud, it sounded ridiculous. Like Thera would somehow have answers to questions I barely had the words to express.

A trickle of icy water from the now melting sleet ran down the back of my neck and under my collar. I shivered.

Thera stood with a sigh and took the towel from my hands, then moved between my knees.

“I don't know what happened to Eli,” she said quietly. With quick but gentle movements, she rubbed the towel over my head and down my neck. “I don't know if anyone can really know for sure.”

After the accident, I'd fought for months to regain my independence in everything, from walking unassisted to showering without one of those old-person bath seats. Asking for help always felt like being a burden on someone else, and when it came to my family, I'd already caused so much pain and trouble, I didn't want to add to it any more than necessary. I didn't want to make them care for me when they blamed me.

But it felt so good to be touched, I had to curl my hands into fists to keep from reaching out to pull Thera
closer. I didn't realize how long it had been since I'd felt that connection with another living person.

“But on the really bad days, when I'm struggling and wondering if there's a point to any of this,” she said, “those are the days that I remind myself about the sun.”

“What, that it will come out tomorrow?” I asked.

She retreated with a snort, taking the towel with her. “No,” she said, settling on the foot of her bed. With the room as small as it was, I could still reach out and touch her. “It takes, like, eight minutes for light to reach Earth from the sun. But it's instantaneous to us here.”

Hello, science.
She was a science nerd. I never would have guessed that.

“We don't even think about it,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears as she warmed to the topic. “It's easy to forget that we're one little planet in the distant corner of a huge galaxy and that there probably are other life-forms out there, but not like us. Not exactly like us, anyway. They have problems too, whoever they are. We, in our tiny corner of the universe, don't understand everything, not even half of what we
know
about, let alone what we're still discovering. So—”

“So what's one person dying in all of that?” I asked bitterly. “That's what you're saying.”

“Not at all,” she said. “I'm saying that the world or existence or whatever is bigger than we allow ourselves to
think. Which means that no matter what, we're only seeing part of the picture. Individual pixels. What looks like the end or like meaningless and painful chaos might just mean we're too close to the screen to understand.”

Pain tightened her voice, and her gaze dropped to focus on the towel in her lap as she folded it, matching the raggedy edges precisely.

Immediately, my mind flashed to her in the hall yesterday, Caleb stalking alongside her, trying to touch her hair. How she'd slapped his hand away and picked up her pace.

What had the rest of her day been like? What was the rest of her life like?

I cleared my throat. “So you like bridges?”

Her hands paused, and she looked up. “Yeah.”

“Which one is your favorite?” I gestured to her ceiling.

“Uh, which picture or which bridge?” she asked.

“Both.”

She stood and moved around to the side of the bed to point at a black-and-white photo in the center of the ceiling. “The Juscelino Kubitschek Bridge in Brazil,” she said. “My favorite picture.”

I got up to get a better look at it. The photo showed a side view of a bridge at night, the angled arches glowing like silver.