HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (37 page)

***

It was summer. He knew that. Everything was different. What felt the same was only a shadow, a memory, or a theory about the future. How could things be so inconclusive? Tom wondered, but then thought to himself: that’s the way things are. You know that by now.

The Goldfine girl remained mostly as she was, though she was said to be improving, showing responsiveness, by the doctors. He visited her two or three times a year, not like clockwork, but something he did still try and keep up a kind of regimen about. Because he didn’t like to slide, not at all. Not anymore; he knew too well what it was. Letting one day go by became two, and so on, until he was just someone else who had faded away.

They kept her at Mount Sinai, in Manhattan. The trip was a bit arduous for Tom, he didn’t like to travel, especially not outside of the region. It wasn’t the hotels he minded so much, not their walls, or what they contained, but it was just the physical strain of it. He was getting old.

He often had dreams of that spring morning at the Kingston place, and of falling down, his breath taken from him, his limbs and lips numb, staring up into the rain. Sometimes, when he thought about it, which he usually chose not to, he would swear that he had heard the kid, Christopher, swirling away in all that water, shout to him, “Stay with us, Tommy!”

Stay with us
.

Years went by, and Tom retired. Never having been the police officer with a highfalutin education, thank you, having come into the whole mess with a kind of premature calm, Tom left the force with the same lack of fuss. Just paperwork and handshakes and driving himself along in the Blazer, drinking his coffee, chewing his nicotine gum and thinking about things.

He tried, once, getting in touch with Stephanie. She had moved away from the area; many had, after the disaster. The effort to rebuild Red Rock Falls was admirable, but superficial. Tom knew it was not the kind of wound that healed fast, no matter how many doctors and surgeons were in attendance, it was just something that took time, lots and lots of time. It had inspired him to call her up, to talk to her about what had happened. He knew he could only convey so much — explaining himself or explaining the world had never been his strong suit. It was a good thing anyway, not to burden her; she would only be able to understand so much. And he also knew that it would be a fruitless effort to try and reunite with her.

In the end, Stephanie had seemed genuinely pleased to hear from him. She was married and living in Montana. Brian was attending the university in Helena. She wished Tom well. Tom thanked her for her glassware, the crystal grails, and she told him she was happy to have left him something for his kitchen, and that she hoped he would use everything and look after himself with good healthy meals.

After some more time, Elizabeth was moved from Mount Sinai. The family, whom Tom had never met, save for the sister, Serafina, didn’t leave any word as to where they had taken their daughter. Tom hoped that it wasn’t to a place where she would be taken from the world before her time; he knew she was still doing work, somehow, and that she needed time to heal, like the town did. That was also the way things were.

Tom got a dog. A chocolate lab that he named “Crook.”

Jared Kingston was sent to prison for life. Tom never visited, but he spoke to Jared on the phone twice a year, at Christmas and on Jim Cruickshand’s birthday. Something about keeping in touch with his old friend’s killer seemed oddly right, and Tom felt it would have pleased the big state trooper who Tom had known since boyhood. He did this with dedication, making sure not to slide.

The clear thinking, that electric feeling Tom had gotten a few times during the great ordeal that spring in the Adirondacks, had somehow remained. It would tune in and out, like AM radio, but Tom could hang onto it. He was learning to control it by handling it with kid gloves. He thought if Jim had still been alive he would’ve liked to have talked about it.

All of man’s notions about the nature of the world, the earth, the elements, the animals, the universe, it all came, of course, from his own unconscious understanding of himself. This Tom had learned. Everything was personified — not
some
things, all things. Nothing came from a man that didn’t carry his mark, as part of the expression of his own soul.

And you know now, old Jim. You know
.

Because Jim did know. Because Jim was gone. The name was gone, the particular function was gone; a thing had run its course. But the energy of Jim was still in existence. There was nothing that Tom Milliner was more concretely, absolutely positively assured of in that moment. More than he had ever known anything in his whole life, Tom knew that Jim’s energy was still in existence, in its triumvirate expression; chemical, thermal, electromagnetic, because everything that once was still was — nothing ever went away and nothing ever existed that hadn’t been. There was an everywhere, and there was an everywhen
.
All things existed, always. If not, the sudden absence would collapse the entire system.

The true absence of a single thing would destroy everything that was.

As the village of Red Rock Falls lay in ruins, the outskirts, namely, the Acres, went up in market value. In only four years, Tom’s house doubled in value. He thought once, drinking coffee in the Blazer, sitting in the garage, chewing gum and itching at his now totally bald head, that he would someday leave it. He had retired, and often spent his days at St. Eustace Rehabilitation Center, where he talked to recovering alkies and junkies in a way he’d never been able to talk to any other people alive. This fulfilled and enlivened him, but only while he was at the center. Back at home, with as much company as Crook gave him, the days were lonely, the nights even lonelier. Rarely would twenty-four hours pass without haunting visions of Jim, sitting in the Caprice, staring out through the windshield at Tom, or of the girl with her goop-covered eyes, helpless while those horrid birds with their curved sucker-beaks and sidewinding tongues flapped away with her, carrying her to a land of rock and ash.

After two more years, providing seller-financing that made the realtors cry in their sleep, Tom sold his home at quadruple its value from only six years before.

Tom left Red Rock. It was a liberation. It was deserved. Tom was a slave who, even at the ripe old age of sixty-eight, had been emancipated. He might have grown accustomed to his life, he might have even grown to love it, but now he would enjoy his freedom. He would travel the one last time.

He left word for Maddy, who had returned to her job. She had been so busy during the months following the disaster that they had hardly seen each other. They’d made plans to talk, many plans, but the moment had never arrived. So, he left word. He had finally learned how to use the computer, and he’d sent her an email. In it he described one of his more satisfying days at the St. Eustace Center, and then told her where he was headed. He ended the note with the words,
Ride Captain Ride
.

And as much as it pained him, there was some kind of relief that Maddy never came.

But someone else did.

Tom lived for another fourteen years. During that time he read the paper, he switched from nicotine gum to regular gum (though the coffee kept coming) and he walked with Crook on the beach. He made a few friends, and eventually became close with one of them, a woman, Stella, who had a daughter, Hanna, and he shared a few things with Stella about his life, but mostly he just wanted to live where he was, in the here and now.

Tom Milliner died in his sleep, Crook on the floor by the side of the bed, Stella in the condo less than a quarter mile away, who found him in the morning; she wasn’t too upset, either. She had first felt faint, but then she smiled and put the grapefruit juice on the end table next to him and went and made the coffee downstairs and fed Crook, before calling anybody.

***

When Caleb came to visit Tom in his home in Florida, he was a young man. He stood in Tom’s sun-spangled kitchen. Tom’s first thought was that he looked like his father. He even stood like him.

“Hi,” said the young man, and Tom searched his face for traces of that baby boy. He found them. “Is this okay that I’m here?”

“Of course.”

For a moment, Caleb remained standing like that in the kitchen. He was wearing cargo shorts and a t-shirt. He looked sinewy and healthy. His eyes shone with clarity. Tom motioned them out to the lanai, where they sat across from one another.

“You’ve grown.”

Caleb smiled. He had a charming smile, and a guileless expression.

“I have.” He studied his fingers for a moment, which he interlaced between his knees. Then he looked at Tom. “How have you been?”

“You know what they say about retirement. It’s the perfect job.”

Caleb smiled. A moment passed. “I want to thank you.”

Tom felt his face flush and he looked down at his own hands. “Well . . . I don’t know what I did.”

“What you did was not give up on me. On us. You believed in us, you believed in helping us, even when it was dark, even when you might not have known why.”

“Well, I guess there’s lots of things I didn’t know. If I only acted when I knew exactly what was going on . . .” Tom shrugged. He wasn’t sure how to finish.

Caleb looked at him gently, intently. “Which is why I want to tell you a couple of things.”

Tom looked at the young man who gazed steadily back. “How is Christopher? I was out of it there, for a while. Recuperating, like everyone else, I guess. I lost track of you two. I never asked. I was afraid that . . .”

“It’s okay.”

Outside, a Gulf breeze blew. It came in through the open windows of the lanai, bringing the scent of salt and earth. The air was warm, and only a little humid. A perfect day.

“You did just right,” said Caleb. “Just right.”

It was strange to hear the young man talk this way, thought Tom. He had remained a baby boy in Tom’s memory, and dreams. Just the fact of his existence was fascinating.

“I wanted to tell you: we did well. My dad — Christopher — and I, we’ve done well. And we’re not nearly finished yet.”

He searched for the next words.

“There is no one event. There are all sorts of predictions about this time in history. And they’re all there for a reason. There are no accidents; that’s what I know.”

“Do you remember it?”

Caleb looked up at Tom.

“Some things. Images, feelings. All that water.”

He put himself back on track.

“There is no ultimate end, but one. One day. And not like people think. Not at all like people think. These other things, these ideas of apocalypse, of end times, they’re growing pains.”

“Pretty major growing pains.”

“Yes they are. But that’s not . . . what I wanted to tell you, Tom, is that my mother woke up.”

Tom sat up straighter, feeling a brightness wash through him. “That’s wonderful. How is she?”

“She’s doing well. She lost a lot of time, but she’s making up for it. Doctors say she’s a hundred percent.”

“Caleb that’s . . . that’s just so great. I’m happy for you.”

“I thought you’d like to hear. It’s tough having things unresolved...”

Tom nodded, wondering if Caleb was inviting him to bring something up. He could, of course, think of something — a familiar twinge. It wasn’t alarming as much as it was a kind of nostalgia. It had been over a decade since he’d heard the term the young men had used to describe themselves, and years since he’d even thought it.

“There’s a story about Judas betraying Jesus for twenty pieces of silver,” Tom said. “During all that craziness, I was in the car with Maddy — you remember her — and I was theorizing that wagerers were a part of that story. Am I crazy?”

“You’re not crazy at all. It’s a great and powerful representation, a story describing something that has occurred in ways which we can only understand a little at a time.”

Tom, waited, sensing Caleb wasn’t finished.

“I don’t mean people are too unintelligent to grasp it, that’s not what I mean. On the contrary, people are very clever. These things are closer to them than they may realize. Just there beneath the surface. Sometimes those are the hardest things to see, because we’re so close.”

Tom absorbed this. He added, “I was thinking that, you know, when this happened, as the story goes, after Judas died, he went into purgatory. He was forgiven, but his action filled him with such guilt, such remorse, that he’s been paying for it ever since. Actually paying for it. You know? The coins.”

“Yes, the coins.”

Tom paused, thinking, then continued, “It’s his way of interceding, trying to right his wrong.”

Tom shifted in his seat. He felt a little of the old investigator-blood beginning to course through him.

“But then I was thinking, if Judas can repurpose someone like this, to take young people who have . . . gone the wrong way, and use them, it sounds like necromancy. Like something not good or saintly.”

“It does sound that way, yes. But I promise you, Tom, it’s not that. Nobody has been raised from the dead. There would have to be a definitive ‘dead’ in order for that to be the case, and there isn’t, because death is only something conceived by the living.”